This paper analyses the role of credit rating agencies in sovereign debt crises. Using a panel of 53 emerging and developing countries with annual data going back to 1977, the paper shows that credit ratings are not very good predictors of debt distress events once tested against a simple...

This paper examines the impact of financial constraints on innovation for established firms. We make use of a direct measure of the existence of financial constraints obtained thanks to a specific survey addressed to French established firms (FIT, Sessi). This is a distinctive feature of this...

This article aims at linking the household wealth and income distributions for 15 European countries using the Household Finance and Consumption Survey. We study the role played by the household's location in the income distributions in determining its location in the wealth distribution. A...

This paper studies the divergence/convergence process of European countries as regard the financing behavior of small and medium sized enterprises. Using a firm level and country representative survey, we construct country-time indicators of SMEs' use of three external financing sources: bank...

In order to provide short run forecasts of headline and core HICP inflation for France, we assess the forecasting performance of a large set of economic indicators, individually and jointly, as well as using dynamic factor models. We run out-of-sample forecasts implementing the Stock and Watson...

In order to provide medium run forecasts of headline and core HICP inflation for the euro area, we assess the usefulness of dynamic factor models. We use Stock and Watson's (1999) out-of-sample methodology for models estimated over the 1988:1-2002:3 period, with balanced and unbalanced panels....

The paper implements a consistent empirical strategy in order to investigate the behaviour of the markup over the cycle and its contribution to inflation movements.We model the price series as I(2) components and use polynomial cointegration in order to recover a long-run price schedule. We do...

The paper contributes to the literature on the convergence of financial systems in the euro area by estimating household credit demand in individual countries. Using the ARDL framework advocated notably by Pesaran et al. (1999), the paper provides evidence on the convergence of long run credit...

The article contributes to the literature on financial fragility, studying how macro-economic shocks affect supply and demand in the corporate debt market. We take into account the effect of the competitive environment, as well as the risk level, measured by companies' default rate. The model is...

Using a large sample of accounting data for non financial companies in France on the period 1990-2004, the paper studies the interactions between macroeconomic shocks and companies financial fragility. We consider links in both directions, namely whether .rms. bankruptcies are affected by...