A growing body of literature indicates that competition increases bank soundness. Applying an industrial organization based approach to large data sets for European and U.S. banks, we offer new empirical evidence that efficiency plays a key role in the transmission from competition to soundness....

Monetary policy aims at affecting corporate borrowing by influencing the marginal costs of firms, but its potency can be conditioned by the degree of market competition. We first identify conditions under which changes in marginal costs may have different effects on credit constraints and output...

We examine rating behaviour after the introduction of new regulations regarding Credit Rating Agencies (CRAs) in the European securitisation market. Employing a large sample of 12,469 ABS tranches issued between 1998 and 2018, we examine the information content of yield spreads of ABS at the...

This paper develops a Bayesian VAR model to identify three structural shocks driving the European gas market: demand, supply and inventory shocks. We document how gas price fluctuations have a heterogeneous pass-through to euro area prices depending on the underlying shock driving them. The...

This study investigates the pricing behaviour of firms in the euro area on the basis of surveys conducted by nine Eurosystem national central banks, covering more than 11,000 firms. The results, robust across countries, show that firms operate in monopolistically competitive markets, where...