Traditionally, regulation of banks has focused on the riskentailed in bank loans. Loans are typically nontradedassets. In recent years, another component of bank assetshas become increasingly important: assets actively tradedin the financial markets.1 These assets form the “tradingbook” of a...

The paper analyzes the existence and impact of …financing constraints as a possiblyserious obstacle to innovation by …firms. Direct measures of fi…nancing constraints areemployed using survey data collected by the Banque de France and Eurostat, whichovercomes the problems with the traditional...