Using data from the US, UK, Japan and Canada, this paper provides evidence on the benefits to an economy from "multiple avenues of intermediation". The overall conclusion is that the existence of active securities markets alongside banks is indeed beneficial to the stability of corporate...

There has been growing interest in the use of financial spreads as advance indicators of real activity and inflation. Empirical evidence is marshalled on a range of spreads when these are used in vector autoregressive models of the UK and German economies. It is found that they do have...

This paper uses flow-of-funds and balance sheet data to analyze the impact of financial crises on corporate financing and GDP in a range of countries. Post-crisis GDP contractions are mainly accounted for by declines in investment and inventory and are more severe for emerging market countries....