Recent studies in corporate finance estimate firm-varying investment-cash flow sensitivities (ICFS) when empirically studying financing constraints. We go along with this approach but suggest two methodological improvements. First, we estimate firm-varying ICFS by modeling heterogeneous slopes...

Cloud computing is a new general purpose Internet-based technology through which information is stored in servers and provided as a service and on-demand to clients. Adopting the endogenous market structures approach to macroeconomics, we analyze the economic impact of the gradual introduction...

Economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa has been lagging behind. At the time of independence, a number of Sub-Saharan countries had relatively favourable development prospects and income levels comparable with those in Southeast Asian countries. Yet, many Southeast Asian countries today have...

This paper sheds light on the financial turmoil in the insurance sector from a Belgian supervisory perspective.3 An assessment is made of the main difficulties encountered by insurers and their supervisors during the development and acceleration of the financial crisis. Particular attention is...

Data mining involves extracting interesting patterns from data to create and enhance decision support systems. Whereas in the early days of data mining, some tasks already relied on statistical and operations research methods such as linear programming and forecasting, data mining methods...

Ever since the Bosman case opened the labour market for players in European professional football, competitive balance has reduced in favour of the Big 5 leagues (England, Spain, Italy, Germany and France) and more specific in England, Spain and Italy. In this article we show that changing...

This study investigates determinants of goodwill impairment decisions and their disclosure quality. Under IAS36 goodwill is subject to an annual impairment test in which the carrying amount of goodwill is not allowed to exceed the recoverable amount. However, valuing this recoverable amount is...

For discussions of postal regulation, often telecommunications regulation is used as a reference framework. Both the postal and the telecommunications market frameworks aim at fostering effective competition and innovations for the further development of the so-called Information Society. Recent...

In the past decades, several countries have introduced reverse auctions for allocating universal service or public mission subsidies in various industries. Examples include urban transport, air transport and telecommunications. Recently, such mechanisms have also been envisioned in liberalized...