We construct a money market pressure index based on central bank reserves and the short-term nominal interest rate to identify banking crises, thereby extending the index proposed by Von Hagen and Ho (2007), also in terms of the number of countries covered. We compare the crises identified by...

According to theory, institutional investors face both risk-management and risk-shifting incentives. This article assesses the relevance of these conflicting incentives for Dutch pension funds and insurance firms over the period 1995 to 2009. Using a unique and extended data set, we observe a...

This article proposes a solution to one of the issues in the rapidly growing literature on dynamic factor models, i.e., how to determine the optimal number of factors. Our formal test, based upon the canonical correlation procedure related to concepts from information theory, produces estimates...

This paper presents a threshold uncertainty investment model for Dutch firms. The proposed uncertainty measure is constructed as an empirical proxy for the standard real options multiple. The uncertainty measure serves as the threshold variable in estimating a piecewise linear accelerator...

This paper analyses revisions of Swiss current account data, taking into account the actual data revision process and the implied types of revisions. In addition we investigate whether the first release of current account data can be improved upon by the use of survey results as gathered by the...