Recent studies have documented that auditor industry specialization is associated with higher audit fees for public firms in Australia, the U.S. and the U.K. This paper uses a unique dataset that consists of all audit engagements for the year 2004 to examine this issue in Belgium. We document...

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...

Nowadays one observes an increasing interest in the entrepreneurial behaviour of universities. In this contribution the role of entrepreneurial universities within national innovation systems is situated. Specific attention is being paid to the alleged presence of unintended side effects on the...

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...

This paper discusses the impact of increasing standards in food production and trade on the export opportunities of low-income countries and on development in these countries. The increase in food standards is often seen as a threat to poor countries, diminishing their export opportunities and...

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...

This paper focuses on the role of marketing in pro-poor development, with a specific focus on (primary) producers of high-value products in developing countries. Marketing is an interdisciplinary field of research that, according to the authors, can make a significant contribution to pro-poor...

The practice of slash-and-burn agriculture in poor tropical countries is often one of the main causes for deforestation, leading to biodiversity loss and to potential externality effects on lowland agricultural productivity. Under innovative environmental policies, direct conservation payments...