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...

We show that FinTech lending affects credit markets and real economic activity using a unique data set of a Peer-to-Business platform for which we have the universe of loan applications. We find that FinTech serves high quality and creditworthy small businesses who already have access to bank...

This article takes advantage of access to confidential matched bank-firm data relative to the Belgian economy to investigate how employment decisions of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have been affected by credit constraints in the wake of the Great Recession. Variability in banks'...

This paper describes a machine learning technique to timely identify cases of individual bank financial distress. Our work represents the first attempt in the literature to develop an early warning system specifically for small European banks. We employ a machine learning technique, and build a...

Small firms often do not change their number of employees from year to year. This paper investigates the role of adjustment costs and indivisibility of labor in the employment stickiness of manufacturing firms with less than 75 employees. When small firms have to adjust employment in units of at...

This paper analyses the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic shock on small open economies in a monetary union with an application to the euro area. Accounting for a high degree of openness and a strong dependence on intra and extra union trade, we focus on the size and the direction of...

Using a lender cut-off rule that generates plausibly exogenous variation in credit supply, I analyze real effects of loan rejections in a sample of small and medium-sized enterprises. I find that loan rejections reduce asset growth, investments, and employment, and these effects are concentrated...

We explore the nature of Business Groups, that is network-like forms of hierarchical organization between legally autonomous …rms spanning both within and across national borders. Exploiting a unique dataset of 270,474 headquarters controlling more than 1,500,000 (domestic and foreign) a¢...