Stress tests have been increasingly used in recent years by regulators to foster confidence in the banking sector by not only increasing its resilience via mandatory capital increases but also by enhancing transparency to allow investors to better discriminate between banks. In this study, using...

We analyze the degree of anchoring of inflation expectations in the euro area during the post-crisis period, with a focus on the time span from 2014 onwards when long-term beliefs have substantially drifted away from the policy target. Using a new estimation technique, we look at tail...

This study analyses the policy measures taken in the euro area in response to the outbreak and the escalating diffusion of new coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. We focus on monetary, microprudential and macroprudential policies designed specifically to support bank lending conditions. For...

We decompose euro area sovereign bond yields into five distinct components: i) expected future short-term risk-free rates and a term premium, ii) default risk premium, iii) redenomination risk premium, iv) liquidity risk premium, and a v) segmentation (convenience) premium. Iden- tification is...

This paper builds a database of idiosyncratic shocks (events) in global banks and car manufacturers (as representative of non-financial firms), and focuses on how these influence a number of macroeconomic and firm-specific variables in the short- and medium-term. We find that these shocks spawn...

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,...

This paper investigates the behaviour of credit rating agencies (CRAs) using a natural experiment in monetary policy. Specifically, we exploit the corporate QE of the Eurosystem and its rating-based specific design which generates exogenous variation in the probability for a bond of becoming...

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...

We assess the impact of credit constraints on investment, inventories and other working capital and firm growth with a large panel of small and medium-sized enterprises from 12 European countries for the period 2014-2016. The data come from the Survey on the access to finance of enterprises...

On March 10, 2016, the European Central Bank (ECB) announced the Corporate Sector Purchase Programme (CSPP) - commonly known as corporate quantitative easing (QE) - to improve the financing conditions of the Eurozone's real economy and strengthen the pass-through of unconventional monetary...