We introduce a novel data set to analyze the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on SME cash flows. The crisis led to a sharp drop in economic activity in the UK, which hit SMEs harder than larger businesses. The data set comprises monthly information on all 2 million SMEs that have current accounts...

The Covid-19 crisis led to a sharp drop in economic activity in the UK, which hit small and medium enterprises (SMEs) harder than larger businesses. We introduce a novel loan level dataset for 2 million UK SMEs (~5 billion data points) to document a few important facts during Covid-19: (1) The...

This paper examines the importance of central bank communication in ensuring the effectiveness of monetary policy and in underpinning the credibility, accountability and legitimacy of independent central banks. It documents how communication has become a monetary policy tool in itself; one...

We test the usefulness of Machine Learning (ML) for sovereign risk assessment and pricing in the euro area along two important dimensions: i) their predictive accuracy compared to traditional econometrics methods and, ii) their assessment on what are the most important economic factors behind...

Using an extensive dataset on public speaking events by ECB and euro area National Central Bank (NCB) officials, we show that communication outside of ECB regular monetary policy meeting days has a significant effect on daily movements in Eonia rates, market-based inflation expectations and...