The objective of this paper is to examine the predictability of the monetary policy decisions of the Governing Council of the ECB and the transmission of the unexpected component of the monetary policy decisions to the yield curve. We find, using new methodologies, that markets do not fully...

In this paper we provide an overview of the growth model in China and its prospects, taking a medium-run to long-run perspective. Our main conclusions are as follows. First, the still prevailing producer-biased model of managed capitalism in China tends to engender, as an inherent byproduct,...

This paper analyses the impact of alternative measures of firms' financial health on their investment and employment decisions. The emphasis is on the analysis of disaggregated data on such financial indicators. For this purpose, itemised data from a sample of the non-financial firms reporting...

We present a comparable set of results on the monetary transmission channels on firm investment for the four largest countries of the euro area (Germany, France, Italy and Spain). With particularly rich micro datasets for each country containing over 215,000 observations from 1985 to 1999, we...

This paper shows that liquidity constraints restrict job creation even when labor markets are flexible. In a dynamic model of labor demand, I show that in an environment of imperfect capital and imperfect labor markets, firms use temporary contracts to relax financial constraints. Evidence for...

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....

This paper examines the adjustment of inventories by firms in the UK and Spain. A widely-held view—but one which has not found much support in previous studies of inventories— is that a key channel for monetary policy is through influencing inventory accumulation. Using a large company-level...

This paper studies how investment and production in an economy is allocated across sectors when they face asymmetric financial conditions. Namely, when investors in one sector may run projects with higher loan-to-values than in another sector. Investors decide where to invest based on total...

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...