The surge in the German current account surplus in the 2000s is often interpreted as the result of efficiency-enhancing structural reforms, especially in the labor market. However, this interpretation is puzzling because the growth rate of the German economy has been one of the lowest in the...

We incorporate costly external finance in a production based asset pricing model and investigate whether financing frictions are quantitatively important for pricing a cross-section of expected returns. We show that the common assumptions about the nature of the financing frictions are captured...

We model corporate liquidity policy and show that aggregate risk exposure is a key determinant of how firms choose between cash and bank credit lines. Banks create liquidity for firms by pooling their idiosyncratic risks. As a result, firms with high aggregate risk find it costly to get credit...

Does inefficiency of financial markets have real consequences? Or does it only result in transfers of wealth from noise traders to arbitrageurs? We study firm business investment to address this question. In our model, benevolent managers of overvalued companies invest in projects with negative...

This paper uses a unique micro-level data-set on Chinese firms to test for the existence of a 'political-pecking order' in the allocation of credit. Our findings are threefold. Firstly, private Chinese firms are credit constrained while State-owned firms and foreign-owned firms in China are not;...

This paper presents evidence supporting the theory that informational and incentive problems in capital markets affect firm investment. This hypothesis is tested by estimating investment equations for two groups of German manufacturing firms. The first group of firms are those with bank...

This Paper explores the hypothesis that the dollarization of liabilities in emerging market economies is the result of a lack of monetary credibility. I present a model in which firms choose the currency composition of their debts so as to minimize their probability of default. Decreasing...

Previous empirical work on the link between domestic and foreign investment provides mixed results which partly depend on the level of aggregation of the data. We argue that the aggregated home country implications of foreign direct investment (FDI) cannot be gauged using firm-level data....

I argue in this paper that the `speed of convergence' estimated in recent works on `convergence' does not capture `actual' convergence towards a steady state, but rather conditional dynamics towards a moving target. Although this conditional convergence can be taken to imply that there are...

This paper analyses the determinants of the inventory to assets ratio in panel data sets of Japanese and UK firms in the period 1960–85. The analytical framework sets inventory decisions in the context of decisions by the firm about other assets and liabilities, in contrast to traditional...