Small and medium-sized enterprises are a centrepiece of Europe's economy. Due to their limited size and their generally lower creditworthiness, their access to financial market instruments is more limited than for large enterprises, which benefit from more elaborate Treasury operations,...

This study assesses the reaction of stock markets, when Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) announce that they have taken a stake in a listed company. It adds useful empirical results to the debate on the effect of SWFs on financial markets, which remains so far largely reliant on guess work. We...

In this paper, I study how the CEO's election can be biased if some directors in the board belong to the same network. I use a static Bayesian game. Directors want to elect the best candidate but they also want to vote for the winner. In that context, results show that, when no candidate is part...

This paper studies the scope for cross-border contagion in the European banking sector using true bilateral exposure data. Using a model of sequential solvency and liquidity cascades in networks, we analyze geographical patterns of loss propagation from 2008 to 2012. We study the distribution of...

We exploit the Eurosystem’s longer-term refinancing operations (LTROs) of 2011-2012 to analyze the effects that a large provision of central bank liquidity to banks has on the credit supply to firms. We control for credit demand by examining firms that borrow from several banks, in addition to...

This article analyses the dispersion of risk weights for large corporate portfolios and identifies the sources of dispersion among banks in terms of the Basel risk parameters. The analysis focuses on loans granted by 5 large French banking groups to large corporates operating in France and rated...

We study the real effect on banks’ credit supply after a negative liquidity shock. Controlling for demand effects, we take advantage of the exogenous international interbank market freeze in 2007-2008 to assess the causal relation between French banks’ liquidity risk and their lending. We...