This paper provides a pan-European assessment of EU credit guarantees to SMEs. Synthesizing past research, it investigates the firm-level economic impact of over 360,000 guaranteed loans under the EU MAP and CIP programmes from 2002 to 2016. These loans represented a total amount of EUR 22bn...

In this paper a new instrument for monetary policy shocks is presented. Exogenous variation of the policy rate may come from frictions of collective decision-making. Dissenting votes indicate how far the final decision of the decision making body is from the mean of the members' individually...

This paper explores the connection between "zombie" firms (firms that would typically exit in a competitive market) and bank health and the consequences for aggregate productivity in 11 European countries. Controlling for cyclical effects, the results show that zombie firms are more likely to be...

Information asymmetries can severely limit cross-border border expansion of banks. When a bank enters a new market, it has incomplete information about potential new clients. Such asymmetries are reduced by credit registers, which distribute financial data on bank clients. We investigate the...

Recent events emphasize the role of cross-border linkages between banking systems in transmitting local developments across national borders. This paper analyzes whether international linkages in interbank markets affect the stability of interconnected banking systems and channel financial...

The financial crisis affected regions in Europe in a different magnitude. This is why we examine whether regions which incorporate banks with a higher intermediation quality grow faster in “normal” times and are more resilient in “bad” ones. For this purpose, we measure the...

Small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) of southern euro-area economies (e.g. Italy, Spain) pay significantly higher borrowing rates than their peers of the core (e.g. Germany, France) and this divergence is widening. It is argued that severe market failures prevent SMEs in southern euro area...

The share of off-balance sheet activity (OBSa) in the future of banking business has been questioned by the use of low-quality assets in this activity. Nevertheless, this paper puts forward the adverse selection hypothesis, which counter argues that more stable banks engage in OBSa to a larger...

Rousseau and Wachtel (2011) [Rousseau, P., Wachtel, P., 2011. What is happening to the impact of financial deepening on economic growth? Economic Inquiry 49, 276-288] find a weakening effect of bank finance on growth for more recent periods in replicating King and Levine (1993) [King, R. G.,...