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...

The post-2008 period in the euro area was characterised by sharp dispersion in borrowing costs faced by firms, across both countries and firm types. This dispersion was an important manifestation of the financial fragmentation" which hampered the smooth transmission of accommodative monetary...

This paper investigates whether financial obstacles, and, more generally, financial pressure faced by firms, significantly affect firm growth. For this purpose, we use an unbalanced panel of about 1,000,000 observations for around 155,000 non-financial corporations in five euro area countries....

We study the effects of the diversification of funding sources on the financing conditions for firms. We exploit a regulatory reform which took place in Italy in 2012, i.e., the introduction of "minibonds", which opened a new market-based funding opportunity for unlisted firms. Using the Italian...

We estimate a FAVAR with Bayesian techniques in order to investigate the impact of loan supply conditions on euro area corporate investment and its financing structure. We identify shocks to overall demand and loan supply with sign and impact restrictions. Although tightened financial conditions...

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...

We quantify the role of financial factors behind the sluggish post-crisis performance of European firms. We use a firm-bank-sovereign matched database to identify separate roles for firm and bank balance sheet weaknesses arising from changes in sovereign risk and aggregate demand conditions. We...

This paper uses a unique dataset where credit rejections experienced by euro area firms are matched with firm and bank characteristics. This allows us to study simultaneously the role that bank and firm weakness had in the credit reduction observed in the euro area during the sovereign debt...