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...

The world has been struck by a mutating systemic financial crisis that is unprecedented in terms of financial losses and fiscal costs, geographic reach, and speed and synchronisation. The crisis from August 2007 to date can be divided into three main phases: the financial turmoil from August...

We model economic policy uncertainty (EPU) in the four largest euro area countries by applying machine learning techniques to news articles. The unsupervised machine learning algorithm used makes it possible to retrieve the individual components of overall EPU endogenously for a wide range of...

We study how differences in the aggregate structure of corporate debt financing affect the transmission of monetary policy. Using high-frequency financial market data to identify monetary policy shocks in a panel of euro area countries, we find that: bond finance dampens the overall response of...

How should monetary policy respond to changes in financial conditions? In this paper we consider a simple model where firms are subject to idiosyncratic shocks which may force them to default on their debt. Firms' assets and liabilities are denominated in nominal terms and predetermined when...

We quantitatively assess the macroeconomic effects of country-specific supply-side reforms in the euro area by simulating EAGLE, a multi-country dynamic general equilibrium model. We consider reforms in the labor and services markets of Germany (or, alternatively, Portugal) and the rest of the...

We quantitatively assess the macroeconomic effects of country-specific supply-side reforms in the euro area by simulating EAGLE, a multi-country dynamic general equilibrium model. We consider reforms in the labor and services markets of Germany (or, alternatively, Portugal) and the rest of the...

Since its creation the euro area suffered from imbalances between its core and peripheral members. This paper checks whether macroprudential policy tools - applied in a countercyclical fashion as known from the DSGE literature to the peripheral countries - could contribute to providing more...

We assess the yield impact of asset purchases within the ECB's Securities Markets Programme in five euro area sovereign bond markets during 2010-11. Identification is non-trivial and based on time series panel data regression on predetermined purchases and control covariates. In addition to...

The goal of this paper is to analyze predictability of future asset returns in the context of model uncertainty. Using data for the euro area, the US and the UK, we show that one can improve the forecasts of stock returns using a model averaging approach, and there is a large amount of model...