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I review the burgeoning literature on applications of Markov regime switching models in empirical finance. In particular, distinct attention is devoted to the ability of Markov Switching models to fit the data, filter unknown regimes and states on the basis of the data, to allow a powerful tool to test hypotheses formulated in light of financial theories, and to their forecasting performance with reference to both point and density predictions. The review covers papers concerning a multiplicity of sub-fields in financial economics, ranging from empirical analyses of stock returns, the term structure of default-free interest rates, the dynamics of exchange rates, as well as the joint process of stock and bond returns.

This study examines dynamics of global and regional financial market efficiency; and how specific features of the market and other conditions influence variability in such efficiency.

The study employs fixed effects statistical approach in its examination of how specific features of financial markets influence variability in its efficiency.

This study finds that individual IMF defined economic regions tend to exhibits significantly different financial market efficiency characteristics given specific market features and conditions. In regional level comparative analysis (e.g. Europe, Africa, Asia–Pacific etc.) this study finds that incidence of financial market uncertainty is the dominant condition with significant effect on financial market efficiency across all the IMF regions. In the global level analysis, empirical estimates presented suggest that financial market uncertainty, financial institutional depth and financial institutional efficiency tend to have significant positive influence on global financial market efficiency all things being equal. In the same analysis however, this study finds that financial market and financial institutional access growth has significant negative impact on financial market efficiency.

The uniqueness of this study compared to related ones found in the literature stems from its focus on financial market efficiency at the global, and IMF defined regional block level instead of on a specific economy as often found in the literature. Additionally, in contrast to other related studies, this study further examines the role of global financial market uncertainty in its financial market efficiency analysis. Financial market uncertainty variable may be unique to this study because the variable is derived through an econometric process from a base variable.

The purpose of this study is to understand the impact of the overconfidence of finance managers on the capital structure decisions of family-run businesses in the Indian scenario. Furthermore, this study aims to demonstrate that measurable managerial characteristics explain the capital structure decisions of managers.

The qualitative approach to research, which aims at understanding a given phenomenon among the experts, is followed. Semi-structured interviews are conducted with 21 overconfident finance managers of family-owned businesses. Content analysis is used to analyse the collected data regarding capital structure decisions into several themes to fully explore the issue in the Indian scenario.

In terms of preference for cash or debt, most of the responding overconfident finance managers of family-run businesses agreed that cash is the preferred source of financing over debt financing. This is due to the biased behaviour of overconfident managers, who consider lower availability of debt as a reason to prefer cash over debt financing. The present study reports that overconfident finance managers prefer short- to long-term debt financing. These managers raise certain practical issues, such as stringent debt terms and inflexible repayment schedules, that arise in relation to the long-term debt market. The study also finds that overconfident finance managers do not fully use tax savings. Respondents reported a lack of access to the debt market and a lack of expertise in capital structure decisions as factors in these capital structure decisions. In addition, the study explores various factors, such as the role of government, the Central Bank of India and industry practices, in relation to capital structure decisions. The study finds that the capital structure decisions of these overconfident finance managers are suboptimal because of the presence of overconfidence bias.

This study gathers information from respondents who are finance managers, not top-level managers, of family businesses; the decision not to interview the higher-ranking managers is a potential limitation of the present study. Another limitation is the small number of respondents in a specific firm size. Because of these factors, the generalisability of the findings of this study will obviously be restricted.

The present study has several practical implications. The first is the recognition of overconfidence bias as it affects the decision-making of finance managers. Executives, especially finance executives, will benefit from the recognition of overconfidence bias and will understand how the presence of such bias impacts corporate decision-making. Managers will understand that bias leads to faulty decision-making. The study will provide indirect feedback to policymakers and regulators in terms of understanding the role of macroeconomic variables in economic decisions. The qualitative approach followed in the present study may enhance the understanding of capital structure decisions from a psychological perspective. The majority of studies in the review of literature adopt quantitative approaches; so the qualitative approach adopted here represents a methodological innovation, and it may provide a deeper understanding of the matter.

The existing literature includes quantitative research aimed at understanding the impact of CEO overconfidence on various corporate policies such as capital budgeting, mergers and acquisitions, dividend policy and capital structure decisions. Quantitative research into the presence of overconfidence bias among executives and its impact on corporate policies returns mixed results. To fulfil the need for studies of overconfidence bias among executives with practical implications, this study explores the presence of overconfidence bias among finance managers in family-run businesses and investigates the impact of overconfidence on capital structure decisions.

Private investment in advanced economies contracted sharply during the downturn that followed the global financial crisis. A substantial debt overhang has been one proposed explanation for this development. This paper evaluates the role of debt overhang for the slow recovery in investment in Denmark, a country in which levels of private debt rapidly increased before the crisis.

Based on firm-level panel data, this paper evaluates the links between debt and investment dynamics for individual firms during the downturn that followed the global financial crisis.

High leverage contributed to a slow recovery in investment during the downturn that followed the financial crisis, in particular for small and medium-sized enterprises. The effect cannot solely be attributed to mean reversion in investment.

Results point to the existence of a separate leverage or “balance sheet” channel with implications for macroeconomic volatility and financial stability.

Macroprudential or microprudential measures to counteract the build-up of excess leverage during upswings may contribute to reducing macroeconomic volatility and improving financial stability.

In contrast to previous studies, the panel dimension of data is used to take mean reversion in investment into account. The large, nationally representative panel data set allows to assess the macroeconomic relevance of the results, as well as enables subsample splits which are used to gain insights into potential mechanisms through which debt overhang impacts investment.

This study aims to analyze bank lending behavior before and during the most recent financial crisis. Banks are more willing to grant loans during economic expansion. However, this behavior can result in reduced portfolio asset quality. The analysis tries to facilitate understanding of whether this relationship is always true. A second aim of the study is to highlight whether the impact of credit risk on bank lending behavior during a financial crisis is greater for banks that grew faster during the pre-crisis period than for other banks.

The analysis is based on a sample of banks in Italy, an example of a country undergoing a credit crunch without a lending bubble burst. The methodology is based on a panel regression and author uses different models to test his hypothesis: an ordinary least squares, a fixed effect, a least absolute regression and a Generalized Method of Momentum (GMM). This allows to mitigate some of the endogeneity problems.

The essay shows that effectively, most of the banks that grew faster during a pre-crisis period show a higher growth of non-performing loans and a greater reduction in lending activity during a financial crisis. However, 34 per cent of banks that grew faster during a pre-crisis period have a low growth of non-performing loans in the subsequent years. Finally, the results suggest that credit risk negatively affects bank lending behavior, but a higher impact relative to fast banks with respect to other banks cannot be emphasized.

Findings have some policy implications. First, given the adverse effect of the increase of non-performing loans (NPLs) on the bank’s lending activity and on the broad economy in general, there is merit to strengthen supervision to prevent a further increase and accumulation of NPLs in the bank’s credit portfolio. In addition, the supervisors could require that banks take always high credit standard when extend credit, both during positive economic cycle and during period of contraction. The using of higher credit standard could be helpful in the reduction of the pro-cyclicality of bank’s lending behavior and credit risk. Furthermore, the fact that high level of NPLs continues to impact on the bank’s lending activity and that this activity is very important for the economic recovery underlines that banks should clean-up their credit portfolios as soon as possible.

This paper contributes to the literature in various ways. The study analyzes the cyclical effect of credit growth, i.e. banks increase their bank lending behavior during good times, which leads to an increase in bad loans and a high credit risk in their portfolio. These cyclical effects are not knowingly studied together, but the literature usually analyzes the single steps of the cycle. Second, studying listed and unlisted banks allows to have a more representative sample and to analyze better the real bank lending activity considering both commercial than cooperative banks.

This study aims to analyze the returns obtained from companies with strong growth potential (growth stocks) and the returns from companies with quite low stock prices, but with high value (value stocks).

The sample comprises monthly data, from January 2002 to December 2016, from seven countries, Germany, France, Switzerland, the UK, Portugal, the USA and Japan. The authors have used linear regression models for three different periods, the pre-crisis, subprime crisis and post-crisis period.

The results point out that the performance of value and growth stocks differs from different periods surrounding the global financial crisis. In fact, for six countries, value stocks outperformed growth stocks in the period that precedes the subprime crisis and during the crisis, this tendency remained only for France, Portugal and Japan. This trend changed in the period following the crisis. The results also show that investor sentiment has a robust significance in value and growth stock returns, mostly in the period before the crisis, highlighting that the investor sentiment is more significant in the moments that the value stocks outperformed.

As far as the authors know, this is the first work that, taking into account the future research lines of Capaul et al. (1993), investigates whether the results obtained by those authors remain current, meeting the authors’ challenge and covering the gap of recent studies on the performance of value and growth stocks. Besides, the authors have introduced a new country, heavily punished by both the global financial crisis and the sovereign debt crisis to understand whether there are significant differences in investment styles and whether this is related to the different economies. Also, in this context, the authors were pioneers in adding investor sentiment as an exogenous variable in the influence of stock returns.

Over the years, the impact of the business cycle on firm strategy has been neglected in the area of strategic management and remains one of the most important but least developed research streams in management scholarship. Studies in this area are scattered across time and domains, therefore, there is a need to consolidate this fragmented literature to provide a comprehensive review and thus avenues for further research. This study aims to address this gap.

In this study, the systematic literature review (SLR) method is used to select and examine research articles in the area of firm responses and decisions during recession. This SLR examines 127 studies and carries out a thematic synthesis of the literature.

Based on the SLR and thematic synthesis of the literature, the themes identified in this study include – severity of recession impact (Theme 1); firm specific characteristics (Theme 2); resource adjustment activities (Theme 3); and firm performance (Theme 4), based on these themes and analysis this paper maps and proposes various relationships and linkages in this research domain that can be explored further for the development of scholarship in this field of study.

This paper fulfills the need for a systematic review of the extant literature on firms’ responses during recession. The study synthesizes literature and carries out a thematic analysis from 1980 till the period February 2024 to provide directions to advance this domain of literature.

Despite the increasing evidence on the effects of the economic crisis and austerity policies on the health of the population, we lack knowledge of how the young population is being affected. High unemployment rates, labour instability, high housing costs and cuts in public policies have placed the young in a vulnerable situation. We explore changes (2006–2017) in the both physical and mental health of young people in Spain using a selection of health indicators. By doing so we draw the reader’s attention to three elements with a close relationship to neoliberalism: the prominence of social determinants of health, the importance of inequalities and the accumulation of multiple sources of disadvantage in certain groups and individuals which ultimately condition the course of their lives; and the use of medicalization as a common and legitimised response to poor mental health.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the Irish banking crisis and explain how various factors contribute to a collapse in asset prices, an economic recession and the near failure of the banking system. The paper seeks to document the dangers of pro‐cyclical monetary and government policies, particularly in an environment of benign financial regulation and pent‐up demand for credit.

The paper maps the Irish banking crisis against its general background. It describes the roots of the crisis, with particular attention given to government and monetary policies, the practices of the financial regulator and banks during the property bubble, together with the difficulties associated with the international sub‐prime crisis.

While the global financial crisis exacerbated matters, the banking crisis in Ireland was largely a home‐grown phenomenon. The crisis stemmed from the collapse of the domestic property sector and subsequent contraction in national output. Its root cause can be found in the inadequate risk management practices of the Irish banks and the failure of the financial regulator to supervise these practices effectively.

The paper documents the “Celtic Tiger” phenomenon of the last decade: the Irish economic and property miracle, its sharp decline, and the sub‐prime crisis. It delineates one of the most severe banking and economic crisis in a developed country since the great depression with a number of key policy lessons for rapidly expanding economies.

This chapter uses quarterly county-level data from 2006 to 2014 to examine the direction of causality in the relationship between per capita opioid prescription rates and employment-to-population ratios. We first estimate models of the effect of per capita opioid prescription rates on employment-to-population ratios, instrumenting opioid prescriptions for younger ages using opioid prescriptions to the elderly. We find that the estimated effect of opioids on employment-to-population ratios is positive but small for women, while there is no relationship for men. We then estimate models of the effect of employment-to-population ratios on opioid prescription rates using a shift-share instrument and find ambiguous results. Overall, our findings suggest that there is no simple causal relationship between economic conditions and the abuse of opioids. Therefore, while improving economic conditions in depressed areas is desirable for many reasons, it is unlikely on its own to curb the opioid epidemic.