Corporate Governance and the Value of Excess Cash Holdings of Large European Firms

We examine the relation between the quality of corporate governance and the value of excess cash for large European firms (FTSEurofirst 300 Index). We use Deminor ratings for Shareholder rights, Takeover defences, Disclosure and Board as proxies for the quality of corporate governance. We find that the value of excess cash is positively related to the Takeover defences score only. It seems that governance mechanisms—except the market for corporate control—are not strong enough to prevent managers from wasting excess cash. For non-UK firms we find that the value of €1 of excess cash in a poorly governed firm is valued at only €0.89 while the value is €1.45 for a good governed firm. We show that poorly governed firms dissipate excess cash relatively quickly with a negative impact on their operating performance as a result.corporate governance;excess cash;take-over defences

De invloed van immigratie op de lonen in Amsterdam en Rotterdam.

De substitutiethese – het idee dat immigratie de lonen van de gevestigde bevolking drukt – blijkt voor sommige geavanceerde economieën wel op te gaan en voor andere niet. Tot op heden is onduidelijk wat daarvan de oorzaak is. In dit artikel wordt de substitutiethese daarom gecontextualiseerd naar stedelijke economie. De verwachting dat een sterk ontwikkelde dienstensector neerwaartse loondruk door immigratie afzwakt, wordt vervolgens onderzocht door postindustrieel Amsterdam met industrieel Rotterdam te vergelijken

Unravelling the Global City Debate: Economic Inequality and Ethnocentrism in Contemporary Dutch Cities

It is hard to overestimate the scholarly impact of Saskia Sassen’s global city theoretical framework, which revolves around the impact of economic globalization on the social, economic, and political reality of cities in advanced economies. Yet, more than two decades of research dedicated to a ‘global city debate’ have left its main issues unresolved. In Unravelling the Global City Debate Jeroen van der Waal argues that this is because scholars have hitherto merely interpreted urban change according to the central theoretical notions in this debate, and neglected to assess their empirical validity. Therefore he unravels the global city debate into the distinct theoretical notions it consists of and puts these to rigorous empirical tests by using data on one of the most urbanized and globalized developed economies in the world: the Netherlands. By doing so, he shows that the standard research practice in the global city debate leaves much to be desired, for it yields both an under- and overestimation of the impact of economic globalization on urban labour markets in contemporary cities in the advanced economie

Foreign Direct Investment and International Migration to Dutch Cities

This article assesses the push- and pull-factor explanation in Sassen’s theory on migration from newly industrialising countries to cities in OECD countries separately. The former explanation argues that foreign direct investments spawn migration flows to the country where these investments stem from. The pull-factor explanation revolves around demand for low-skilled workers in cities due to the clustering of advanced producer services. It is found that Dutch investment flows indeed function as a push factor for migration to Dutch cities, but that the local settlement of immigrants is not related to the clustering of advanced producer services

The conditionality of the substitution thesis on type of urban economy

Studies on the substitution thesis in advanced economies show scattered results: the impact of immigration on the wages and unemployment of lower-educated natives and immigrants varies strongly. In both studies on the substitution thesis itself, as well as studies on the unequal development of urban economies in post-industrialism, there are suggestions that this is because the substitution thesis is conditional on the type of urban economy. More specific, they indicate there is reason to expect that a strong service-centered urban economy yields more labour demand for the lower educated, which consequently mitigates the substitution between immigrants and natives or earlier waves of immigrants. The empirical validity of this expectation is tested by comparing the impact of immigration on the employment level of lower-educated urbanites between 22 Dutch metropolitan areas. The findings corroborate the central hypothesis: immigration leads to higher unemployment levels, but this impact is weaker in the most service-centered urban economies

Noninvasive mapping of repolarization:Validation in healthy and diseased hearts

The initiation and maintenance of (reentrant) arrhythmias is facilitated by local heterogeneities in cardiac activation and repolarization. Detection of these heterogeneities by cardiac mapping is important for guiding local therapy and for early risk stratification of patients, and is presently mostly performed by invasive techniques. A non-invasive method for localization of functional heterogeneities may help the treatment of patients with life threatening ventricular arrhythmias, may support risk stratification and may help to reduce mortality caused by these arrhythmias. This thesis investigates a non-invasive method to determine and localize functional repolarization heterogeneities based on potentials measured at the body surface. It demonstrates that parameters that highlight multiple repolarization moments in the standard 12-lead ECG, better characterize the underlying repolarization gradient than the single time point of latest global repolarization (QTtime). For further localization of possible heterogeneities, this thesis uses the equivalent dipole layer (EDL) method for the solution of the inverse problem of electrocardiography; the mathematical reconstruction of cardiac electrical activity from body surface electrograms and a geometric model of the torso. The accuracy was investigated in in-silico, ex-vivo, and in-vivo settings, showing good correlations with gold standard repolarization times, even in the presence of noise, abnormal repolarization or myocardial infarction. In addition, comparison of the EDL method with the more commonly used epicardial potential (EP) method shows that both methods provide accurate reconstruction of cardiac activation and repolarization patterns and beat origins, with the EDL method showing a better correlation for activation timings and beat origins than the EP method. Although the use of this technique for noninvasive mapping of repolarization is promising, we provide directions for future research to improve accuracy of inverse reconstruction

Buitenlandse investeringen en internationale migratie naar Nederlandse steden

Verklaringen voor de migratie van laaggeschoolden van arme naar rijke landen worden, conform klassieke migratietheorieën, vanouds gevonden in slechte economische omstandigheden in de herkomstlanden. Volgens Sassen brengt het hedendaagse mondialiseringsproces echter nieuwe, aanvullende push en pull factoren voor deze migratiestromen met zich mee. Buitenlandse investeringen in nieuwe industrielanden zouden migratiestromen veroorzaken richting steden in de landen waaruit de investeringen afkomstig zijn. Bovendien zouden migranten zich binnen die landen vooral vestigen in steden waar geavanceerde producentendiensten geclusterd zijn, omdat die een hoge arbeidsvraag naar laaggeschoolden kennen. In dit artikel wordt de empirische houdbaarheid van deze veronderstellingen onderzocht door te kijken naar migratie vanuit nieuwe industrielanden naar Nederlandse steden

Unravelling The Global City Debate on Social Inequality

Analyzing the social consequences of globalization in cities based on global city theory is therefore not only obscuring a core feature of globalization as international competition, but also overstates the social consequences of globalization for many workers in cities in the advanced economies. After all, as argued before, economic restructuring in cities with the advanced economies is largely driven by local and national processes instead of international or global ones. Our findings in