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 provides a quantitative assessment of the relative importance of global structural shocks for changes in financial conditions across a sample of emerging market economies. We disentangle four key drivers of global financial markets (oil supply shocks, global economic news shocks,...

We use EU sovereign bond yield and CDS spreads daily data to carry out an event study analysis on the reaction of government yield spreads before and after announcements from rating agencies (Standard & Poor's, Moody's, Fitch). Our results show: significant responses of government bond yield...

We establish basic facts about the external finance premium. Tens of millions of individual loan contracts extended to euro area firms allow studying the determinants of the external finance premium at the country, bank, firm, and contract levels of disaggregation. At the country level, the...

We propose a new methodology to recover firm-time varying financial constraints from firms' production behavior. We model financial constraints as the profitability that firms forgo when budget constraints on production inputs bind, impeding them from using the optimal level of inputs and...

The rise of bond financing in EuropeUsing large panel data of public and private firms, this paper dissects the growth of bond financing in the Euro Area through the lens of the cross-section of issuers. In recent years, the composition of bond issuers has shifted, with the entry of many smaller...

This paper considers the role of foreign investors in developed-country equity markets. It presents a quantitative model of trading that is built around two new assumptions: (i) both the foreign and domestic investor populations contain investors of different sophistication, and (ii) investor...

By focusing on the cost conditions at issuance, I find that not only the Covid-19 pandemic effects were different across bonds and firms at different stages, but also that the market composition was significantly affected, collapsing on investment-grade bonds, a segment in which the share of...

More than five years after the start of the Sovereign debt crisis in Europe, its impact on labour market outcomes is not clear. This paper aims to fill this gap. We use qualitative firm-level data for 24 European countries, collected within the Wage Dynamics Network (WDN) of the ESCB. We first...

The Great Recession has been characterised by the two stylized facts: the buildup of leverage in the household sector in the period preceding the recession and a protracted economic recovery that followed. We attempt to explain these two facts as an information friction, whereby agents are...