Financial institutions are key to allocate capital to its most productive uses. In order to examine the relationship between productivity and bank credit in the context of different financial market set-ups, we introduce a model of overlapping generations of entrepreneurs under complete and...

This paper studies the long-run evolution of bank risk and its links to the macroeconomy. Using data for 17 advanced economies, we show that the riskiness of bank assets declined materially between 1870 and 2016. But even though bank assets have become safer, the losses on these assets are...

This paper studies the long-run evolution of bank risk and its links to the macroeconomy. Using data for 17 advanced economies, we show that the riskiness of bank assets declined materially between 1870 and 2016. But even though bank assets have become safer, the losses on these assets are...

We study how financial market efficiency affects a measure of diversification of output across industrial sectors borrowed from the portfolio allocation literature. Using data on sector-level value added for a wide cross section of countries and for various levels of disaggregation, we construct...

I find that the Euro-system can stimulate the economy beyond the policy rate by increasing the size of its balance sheet or the monetary base. The transmission mechanism turns out to be different compared to traditional interest rate innovations: (i) whilst the effects on economic activity and...

The 2007-2010 financial crisis highlighted the central role of financial intermediaries' stability in buttressing a smooth transmission of credit to borrowers. While results from the years prior to the crisis often cast doubts on the strength of the bank lending channel, recent evidence shows...

We study the relationship between debt and growth in EU countries in the years 1995-2015. We investigate the debt-growth nexus in two alternative empirical set-ups: the traditional cross-county panel regressions and mean group estimations. We find evidence of a positive long-run relationship...

In this paper we test whether a reallocation of government budget items can enhance long-term GDP growth in a set of European countries. We apply modern panel data techniques to the period 1970-2006, and we use three alternative dependent variables in a growth regression: economic growth, total...

We describe a dynamic model of financial intermediation in which fundamental characteristics of the economy imply a unique equilibrium path of bank and financial market lending. Yet we also show that economies whose fundamental characteristics have converged may continue to have very different...

This paper presents a new dataset on the dynamics of non-performing loans (NPLs) during 88 banking crises since 1990. The data show similarities across crises during NPL build-ups but less so during NPL resolutions. We find a close relationship between NPL problems-elevated and unresolved...