This paper presents evidence that personal relationships between corporate borrowers and bank loan officers improve the outcomes of loan renegotiation. Analysing a bank reorganization in Greece in the mid-2010s, I find that firms that experience an exogenous interruption in their loan officer...

We study the effect of financial distress in foreign parent banks on local SME financing in 14 central and eastern European countries during the early stages of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. We use survey data on applicant and non-applicant firms that enable us to disentangle effects driven by...

When enough agents do not participate in asset markets, the slope of the aggregate demand curve is reversed. Monetary policy should be passive, to ensure equilibrium determinacy and to minimize variations in output and inflation. This paper presents evidence that asset markets participation in...

We identify a novel dimension of monetary policy from high-frequency changes in asset prices around ECB policy events, orthogonal to surprises extracted from risk-free interest rates. We find that it is present in policy events that were interpreted by real-time market commentaries as containing...

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...

We study how financial market effciency 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...

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 investigates the role of economic structures as determinants of FDI inflows. We expand on the existing literature by focusing on advanced economies, using a newly available measure of FDI which cleans the data from statistical artefacts, such as financial round tripping, and by...

In this study we investigate the determinants of financing obstacles using survey data on a sample of around 5000 firms from the euro area countries. This completely new survey - started at the end of 2009 - gives us the opportunity to test whether firm characteristics such as size, age,...