Four years after the introduction of the euro, this paper provides an overview of the current structure and integration of the euro area financial systems and related policy initiatives. We first compare the euro area financial structure with that of the United States and Japan. Using new and...

We investigate the role of systemic financial instability in an empirical macrofinancial model for the euro area, employing a richly specified Markov-Switching Vector Autoregression model to capture the dynamic relationships between a set of core macroeconomic variables and a novel indicator of...

We provide a comprehensive review of firms’ financing channels (internal and external, domestic and international) around the globe, with the focus on alternative finance—financing from all the non-market, non-bank external sources. We argue that while traditional financing channels,...

With extensive country- and firm-level data sets we first document that the financial sectors of most sub-Saharan African countries remain significantly underdeveloped by the standards of other developing countries. We also find that population density appears to be considerably more important...