Against the background of the euro area sovereign debt crisis, our paper investigates the relationship between public debt and economic growth and adds to the existing literature in the following ways. First, we extend the threshold panel methodology by Hansen (1999) to a dynamic setting in...

This paper uses a new survey-based data set and a model with strong theoretical under-pinnings to explain the characteristics and behaviour of discouraged borrowers in the euro area. The results show that more borrowers are discouraged when the average interest rate charged by banks in a country...

This paper provides an encompassing description of the various indicators compiled in the financial module of CompNet using balance sheet information of European firms. We investigate whether and to which extent the heterogeneous financial positions of firms have affected firms' investment...

We study the relation between firms financial structure, access to external finance and labor productivity using a unique dataset of firm-level data for several euro area countries during the period 1995-2011. The empirical strategy is twofold. First we build a synthetic indicator of financial...

We investigate the effect of sovereign stress and of unconventional monetary policy on small firms' financing patterns during the euro area debt crisis. We find that after the crisis started, firms in stressed countries were more likely to be credit rationed, both in the quantity and in the...

This paper considers the impact of changes in governments' payment discipline on the private sector. We argue that increased delays in public payments can affect private sector liquidity and profits and hence ultimately economic growth. We test this prediction empirically for European Union...

We use a large database of more than 685,000 European firms to show that financial flexibility attained through conservative leverage policies is more important for private, small, medium-sized and young firms and for firms in countries with lower access to credit and weaker investor protection....

This paper provides novel information on the propagation of the pandemic-induced real shock to firms' financial conditions. It uses firm-level survey data from end February to early April 2020 for a large sample of euro area SMEs and large firms. Firms' expectations on the availability of credit...

This paper aims at investigating the relationship between firms' profit efficiency, access to finance and innovation activities. We enrich our understanding on firms' performance by adopting the stochastic frontier approach (SFA), which allows us to estimate profit functions and to obtain...