We investigate the effect of sovereign stress and of unconventional monetary policy on small firms' financing patterns during the euro area debt crisis. We find that after the crisis started, firms in stressed countries were more likely to be credit rationed, both in the quantity and in the...

This paper aims at investigating the relationship between firms' profit efficiency, access to finance and innovation activities. We enrich our understanding on firms' performance by adopting the stochastic frontier approach (SFA), which allows us to estimate profit functions and to obtain...

The post-2008 period in the euro area was characterised by sharp dispersion in borrowing costs faced by firms, across both countries and firm types. This dispersion was an important manifestation of the "financial fragmentation" which hampered the smooth transmission of accommodative monetary...

We show that FinTech lending affects credit markets and real economic activity using a unique data set of a Peer-to-Business platform for which we have the universe of loan applications. We find that FinTech serves high quality and creditworthy small businesses who already have access to bank...

This paper analyses the impact that firms financial position has on investment decisions using panel data from a large sample of non-financial corporations(around 120,000 firms) in six euro area countries(Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain). The results indicate that...

Using a lender cut-off rule that generates plausibly exogenous variation in credit supply, I analyze real effects of loan rejections in a sample of small and medium-sized enterprises. I find that loan rejections reduce asset growth, investments, and employment, and these effects are concentrated...

This paper investigates whether financial obstacles, and, more generally, financial pressure faced by firms, significantly affect firm growth. For this purpose, we use an unbalanced panel of about 1,000,000 observations for around 155,000 non-financial corporations in five euro area countries....

We study the effect of financial distress in foreign parent banks on local SME financing in 14 central and eastern European countries during the early stages of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. We use survey data on applicant and non-applicant firms that enable us to disentangle effects driven by...

This article takes advantage of access to confidential matched bank-firm data relative to the Belgian economy to investigate how employment decisions of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have been affected by credit constraints in the wake of the Great Recession. Variability in banks'...

This paper describes a machine learning technique to timely identify cases of individual bank financial distress. Our work represents the first attempt in the literature to develop an early warning system specifically for small European banks. We employ a machine learning technique, and build a...