Non sample information is hidden in frequentist statistics in the choice of the hypothesis to be tested and of the confidence level. Explicit treatment of these elements provides the connection between Bayesian and frequentist statistics. A frequentist decision maker starts from a judgmental...

This paper investigates whether European banks have capital targets and how deviations from the target impact their equity composition and activity mix. Using quarterly data for a sample of large European banks between 2004 and 2011, we show that there are notable asymmetries in banks' reactions...

We find that the increased use of securitisation activity in the banking sector prior to the 2007- 2009 crisis augmented the effect of competition on realised bank risk (i.e. more intense competition and greater use of securitisation is correlated with higher levels of realised risk) during the...

Between 2003 and 2008 productivity patterns diverged between the fast growing, newest members of the European Union and the slower paced, elder ones – as would be expected. However, there are also striking divergences within the latter group, with productivity in Southern Europe going into...

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 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...

In this paper, we investigate the economy-wide effects of the collateral channel by exploiting: (i) a legal reform in Sweden in 2004 that reduced collateral values, and (ii) a dataset that covers all incorporated firms in Sweden over the period 2000-2006. We find that the loss in collateral...

This study focuses on the employment effect of a hiring subsidy available to firms with less than 50 employees, granted in the context of the 2012 Spanish labour market reform. Exploiting the arbitrary firm size threshold using regression discontinuity design, estimates show on average 2...

The paper aims at investigating to what extent wage negotiation set-ups have shaped up firms' response to the Great Recession, taking a firm-level cross-country perspective. We contribute to the literature by building a new micro-distributed database which merges data related to wage bargaining...

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'...