In this paper we examine growth differences between European cities. We have used the Urban Audit, a rather new dataset from Eurostat. After clarifying the merits of this dataset as well as some of its limitations, we provide some detailed characteristics of city growth in the European Union....

In April 2005 the OECD published its guidelines on the corporate governance of state-owned enterprises (S0E). Its first guideline reads that “…SOEs should not be exempt from the application of general laws and regulations… the legal and regulatory framework should allow...

Uncovered interest rate parity provides a crucial theoretical underpinning for many models in international finance and international monetary economics. Though theoretically sound, this concept has not been supported by the empirical evidence. Typically, econometric tests not only reject the...

This paper provides new empirical evidence on the effects of mergers and acquisitions on the shape of the firm size distribution (FSD), by using data of the population of manufacturing firms in the Netherlands. Our analysis shows that M&As do not affect the size distribution when we consider the...

We provide new empirical evidence on non-linear liquidity management in Dutch firms. Our results reveal that liquidity adjustment from below the target is significantly faster than from above. We find no evidence for bands of inaction around the target.

One of the most important potential benefits from the process of international financial integration is the opportunity it offers for diversification of macroeconomic risks internationally. In turn, the cross- border diversification of portfolio holdings is widely considered to be the major...

We study the relation between formal incentives and social exchange in organizations where employees work for several managers and reciprocate to a manager's attention with higher effort. To this end, we develop a common agency model with two-sided moral hazard. We show that when effort is...

In this paper we introduce an alternative version of the trust game by Dasgupta (1988) and Kreps (1990) that allows for asymmetric information. We use this version to study the effect of checking on the trustee’s behaviour, checking is a control option the trustor can decide to use and...

Abstract In this paper we characterize a situation in which non-calculative trust has to play a role in the decision to cooperate. We then analyze the given situation in game theoretical terms and distinguish those aspects of players' decisions that are cooperative from those that may be...

Abstract In this paper, we estimate fundamental bilateral real exchange rates for a group of eight accession countries using a panel-cointegration approach for the period 1993-2003. We document a significant positive link between productivity levels and the corresponding real exchange rate...