This study investigates the impact of foreign bank penetration in Central and Eastern Europe on firm entry. We demonstrate that the acquisition of domestic banks by foreign investors has led to reduced firm creation, smaller average size of entrants and increased firm exit in opaque industries compared to transparent ones. At the same time, the entry of greenfield foreign banks spurred firm creation ...
We analyse the effectiveness of fiscal policy rules for business cycle stabilisation in a monetary union using a quarterly macro-econometric model of Germany. The simulations compare a deficit target and an expenditure target under a range of supply, demand and fiscal shocks. Their effects are evaluated by their impact on prices and output. The analysis demonstrates that in general the deficit target ...
Last year, more women were appointed to the executive boards of major financial institutions. The share of women on the executive boards of banks and savings banks at the end of 2013 was a good six percent, which represents an increase of almost two percentage points over the previous year. This increase is primarily attributable to changes at private financial institutions and cooperative banks. At ...
This paper studies the association between a country’s level of financial development and firms’ employment growth. We employ an incomplete contract model for evaluating this association. The model proposes that a high level of financial development affects the employment of firms with low managerial capital negatively, while firms with high managerial capital benefit from a more developed financial ...
After the global financial crisis, some governments in the EU experienced serious debt financing problems, while others were less affected. This paper seeks to shed light on the divergent fiscal performance by assessing the fiscal conduct in the EU countries before and after the outbreak of the crisis. Fiscal reaction functions of the primary balance are estimated for different groups of EU countries ...
This paper proposes a simultaneous-equation approach to theestimation of the contribution of infrastructure accumulationto private production. A political economy model for theallocation of public infrastructure investment grants isformulated. Our empirical findings, using a panel of largeGerman cities for the years 1980,1986, and 1988, suggest thatcities ruled by a council sharing the State (`Bundesland')government's ...