Small businesses (SMEs) depend on banks for credit. We show that the severity of the Eurozone crisis was worse in countries where firms borrowed more from domestic banks ("domestic bank dependence") than in countries where firms borrowed more from international banks. Eurozone banking...

During the recent financial crisis, euro area firms, and especially Small and Medium-sized Enterprises, have been reporting acute problems of access to external finance. Using firm-level replies to the SME survey on access to finance, we use two indicators of financing constraints based on...

Small businesses (SMEs) depend on banks for credit. We show that the severity of the Eurozone crisis was worse in countries where firms borrowed more from domestic banks ("domestic bank dependence") than in countries where firms borrowed more from international banks. Eurozone banking...

This paper investigates the factors (such as different sources of financing, energy audits and internal monitoring activities) affecting the propensity of European small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to adopt energy efficiency measures (EEMs). For this purpose, a Probit model is estimated...

This paper investigates how access to finance and skilled workforce endowments affect the propensity of European small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to adopt different types of resource efficiency measures (REMs), possibly simultaneously. For this purpose, a Multinomial Logit model is...

This paper investigates the factors (such as different sources of financing, energy audits and internal monitoring activities) affecting the propensity of European small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to adopt energy efficiency measures (EEMs). For this purpose, a Probit model is estimated...

We present a novel approach for analyzing the effects of EU cohesion policy on local economic activity. For all municipalities in the border area of the Czech Republic, Germany and Poland, we collect project-level data on EU funding in the period between 2007 and 2013. Using night light emission...

We study the impact of barriers to entry on workplace training. Our theoretical model indicates that there are two contrasting effects of deregulation on training. With a given number of firms, deregulation reduces the size of rents per unit of output that firms can reap by training their...

This paper shows that Tabellini's recent claim to have provided evidence that culture has a causal effect on economic development is unjustified. Tabellini's claim is based on an instrumental variables analysis in which two instruments are used to identify the supposed causal effect. One of...