We study how firms engaged in both R&D and fixed investment manage liquidity and adjust real investment during the recent financial crisis. Among firms with positive R&D expenditures, cuts to fixed investment in the crisis are typically far more severe than cuts to R&D. These firms allocate cash reserves to buffer R&D but do not use cash to protect fixed investment. Some firms appear to go so f...

In many search models of the labor market, unemployment insurance (UI) is conveniently interpreted as the value of leisure or home production and is, therefore, treated as a parameter. However, in reality, UI has to be funded through taxation that might be distortionary. In this paper, I analyze the welfare implications of raising funds towards UI benefits through different taxation systems wit...

We investigate the relative merits of unconditional cash transfers (UCT), conditional cash transfers (CCT), and improvements in education quality on efficiency and welfare. In our setting some parents under-invest in their children's education because capital market imperfections prevent them from borrowing. When credit constrained households can be perfectly targeted by the government, we show...

support international research collaborations across Europe, were notorious for their abundance of red tape and complicated formalities. The current instalment, FP6, runs out in December 2006. For the successor, the European Commission has now presented a draft proposal containing some radical new thinking and promising 'significant simplification of its operations compared with its predecessor...

Constant pressure to increase return on assets has firms seeking ways to reduce their working capital costs. In the cash management area, firms are employing more sophisticated collection and disbursement systems. Cash management systems today efficiently speed up collections and, at the end of the day, sweep excess balances into money market accounts. Cash managers focus on finding the optimal...

The internet is increasingly used as a source for information and knowledge. Even in the field of healthcare, information is widely available in the internet. In the context of healthcare management, two general questions are of interest: which information or content is provided and how is provided by whom? As sickness funds play a highly relevant role in the German healthcare system, we conduc...

In a general business sense, an electronic wallet (or electronic purse) is a consumer device providing some additional security compared to a mere credit card solution. An electronic wallet could be as simple as an encrypted storage of credit card information that saves consumers to re-enter their credit card data manually each time they make a payment. There is a considerable variety of produc...