The aim of this paper is to assess the level of competition prevailing in the Spanish banking system. The current analysis employs a widely used non-structural methodology put forward by Panzar and Rosse (1987) —the so-called H-statistic— and draws upon a comprehensive panel dataset of...

This paper analyses the impact of loan market competition on the interest rates applied by euro area banks to loans and deposits during the 1994-2004 period, using a novel measure of competition called the Boone indicator. We find evidence that stronger competition implies significantly lower...

Following the increase in private-sector indebtedness before the 2008 Great Recession, balance sheet adjustment by the most indebted agents will be a necessary condition for achieving balanced growth. This paper analyses the deleveraging of the non-financial private sector in four countries that...

Using information of the balance sheets of Spanish banks between 1995 and 2009, we estimate the average impact of current and anticipated changes in banks’ capital on firm lending. We isolate the role of credit supply factors using the variation in capital growth associated to the...

We propose an econometric analysis of the evolution of bank credit to the private sector in order to describe credit cycles and identify phases of particularly low (or negative) credit growth such as those that typically accompany financial or banking crises. We use a sample of twelve developed...

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 focuses on market discipline as a necessary condition to preserve the signaling content of balance sheet indicators and market prices as macroprudential tools. It argues that market discipline enhances the information content of market prices by reflecting the expected private cost of...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the evolution of productivity and how firm behavior and institutional conditions affects productivity. For that purpose, we use a longitudinal sample of Spanish manufacturing and services companies between 1983 and 2006, as well as OECD indicators on product...

This paper estimates the steady state mark-ups of 23 branches of activity in seven developed countries (USA, Japan, Germany, France, UK, Italy and Spain). The empirical methodology departs from the Hall (1988) seminal approach and incorporates the possibility of non-competitive labour markets....

We examine the role of money in three environments: the New Keynesian model with separable utility and static money demand; a nonseparable utility variant with habit formation; and a version with adjustment costs for holding real balances. The last two variants imply forward-looking behavior of...