Following the sovereign debt crisis, bank interest rates charged to non-financial firms declined sharply in the euro area. This work explores the firms' balance-sheet channel hypothesis on the role played by firms' characteristics and risk profile in the transmission of monetary policy. Using a...

We analyse the influence of carry trades involving the Euro on the Eurozone stock market, modelling returns as dependent on macroeconomic risk factors and speculative positions. The latter are measured by the net open futures positions recorded on the CME. While correlated with the standard...

We analyse the impact of macroeconomic and monetary policy shocks on corporate credit risk as measured by firms' probabilities of default (PDs) for the four largest euro area countries. We estimate the impact of shocks on one-year PDs using local projections (LP). For the period 2014-19, we find...

This report analyses and reviews the corporate finance structure of non-financial corporations (NFCs) in the euro area, including how they interact with the macroeconomic environment. Special emphasis is placed on the crisis that began in 2007-08, thus underlining the relevance of financing and...

In the run-up to the financial crisis Italian firms significantly increased their debt in absolute terms and in relation to equity and GDP. The positive gap in firms' leverage between Italy and other euro-area countries has widened in recent years, despite the outstanding debt of Italian firms...