My research focuses on corporate finance and behavioral finance and includes empirical and applied theory papers. My work in corporate finance specifically aims at providing clean and novel empirical evidence on the real effects induced by frictions in the market for financing. My main contributions in this area have been to investigate (1) the role of real estate collateral on economic activit...

This paper studies the long-run relationship between consumption, asset wealth and income in Germany, based on data from 1980 to 2003. While earlier studies — mostly for the AngloSaxon economies — have generally documented that departures of these three variables from their common trend signal changes in asset prices, we find that for Germany they predict changes in income. Asset price changes ...

This paper provides empirical evidence on life-cycle patterns in the asset allocation of Swedish households. Data on household portfolio allocation are collected from the HINK surveys for the period 1982-1992, and portfolio shares of different asset categories are regressed on age, period, and cohort dummies as well as socio-economic and demographic variables. There are evident differences in t...

What is Chronic Poverty? The distinguishing feature of chronic poverty is extended duration in absolute poverty. Therefore, chronically poor people always, or usually, live below a poverty line, which is normally defined in terms of a money indicator (e.g. consumption, income, etc.), but could also be defined in terms of wider or subjective aspects of deprivation. This is different from the tra...

The paper examines the impact of ownership structure on company economic performance in the largest companies from 12 European nations. Ownership structure is measured by the identity and share of the largest owner. Performance is measured by return on assets, market to book values and sales growth controlling for industry, capital structure and nation effects. We find evidence of a bell-shaped...

The paper analyzes an endogenous mechanism leading perfectly symmetric economies to diverge in the long run after unifying their financial asset markets. The standard OLG growth model is extended to include uncertainty and a financial asset used to transfer ownership of the proceeds of an exogenous random production process between generations. Consumers are risk averse, implying that consumers...

About 3 out of 4 new disabled-worker beneficiaries or their spouses owned some type of financial asset in 1982, but the median value of these assets was quite small, according to data obtained by the Social Security Administration in its New Beneficiary Survey. A smaller majority reported owning their own homes, and home equity accounted for most of the reported wealth. Barely a tenth reported ...

Blockholder ownership may increase firm value because of incentive alignment or lower it because of expropriation of minority investors. Dividend policy provides a way to distinguish between the two effects since large owners may prefer low dividends if they derive private benefits from controlling firms, while minority investors may prefer high dividends that benefit all shareholders. I examin...

In many industrial countries, ownership rates of risky assets have risen substantially over the past decade. This trend has potentially wide–ranging implications for the intertemporal and cross–sectional allocation of risk, and for the macro economy, establishing the need for understanding ownership dynamics at the micro level. This paper offers one of the first such analyses using representati...