Globalisation has a major impact on the levels and distribution of wealth. The financial markets are highly integrated, and valuations of financial assets follow international patterns, which has contributed to large increases in financial wealth over the past 25 years. Nonetheless, this has not...

Using comparable survey data from twelve European countries from 1994 to 2001 we investigate households' attitudes towards mortgage indebtedness. We find that a given debt burden creates much higher distress in countries with fewer mortgage holders relative to countries where a significant part...

Aggregate loan development typically hinges on a combination of factors that impact simultaneously on the demand and the supply side of bank lending. The financial turmoil starting in mid-2007 had detrimental consequences for banks' balance-sheets, cost of funds and profitability, thus weighing...

Global trade contracted quickly and severely during the global crisis. This paper, using a unique dataset of French firms, matching together export data with firm-level credit constraints, shows that most of the 2008-2009 trade collapse is accounted by the unprecedented demand shock and by...

Any empirical analysis of the credit channel faces a key identification challenge: changes in credit supply and demand are difficult to disentangle. To address this issue, we use the detailed answers from the US and the confidential and unique Euro area bank lending surveys. Embedding this...

Using a unique survey database of 8265 firms from 25 transition economies, I find that lack of access to finance in general, and to bank credit in particular, is associated with significantly lower investment in on-the-job training. This effect is stronger in education-intensive industries and...

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 argues that counter-cyclical liquidity hoarding by financial intermediaries may strongly amplify business cycles. It develops a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model in which banks operate subject to agency problems and funding liquidity risk in their inter- mediation activity....