The recovery in private business investment globally remains extremely weak more than seven years after the financial crisis. This paper contributes to the ongoing policy debate on the factors behind this weakness by analyzing the role of growth prospects and uncertainty in explaining...

This paper attempts to test whether financial supply-side shifts explain the low-investment climate of private firms in Germany. The core contention is that a firm's financial position contributes to its access to external finance on credit markets. Special emphasizes is put on small and...

The Freedman's Savings Bank (1865-1874) was Congressionally-approved to meet the credit needs for the emerging African American community. Preceding and then after Freedman, the post-bellum financial infrastructure was built reflecting a national banking system (1863), the Central Bank (Federal...

This paper investigates whether the Quantitative Easing (QE) program implemented by the Federal Reserve Board after the 2007-2008 global financial crisis affects firms in emerging economies by improving their access to external financing. Our hypothesis relies on the idea that the excess of...

We examine the propagation mechanisms of the US financial crisis that erupted in 2008 on the Asian economy, which was tightly linked to the US through exports and financial relationships. While two possible propagation channels, trade and financial channels, are identified in previous...

In this paper I document two new facts. First, bank net-interest margins (NIM) are insensitive to the short rate on average but this masks substantial heterogeneity in the cross section. I find cross sectional variation ranging from a -30bp to +40bp change in one quarter NIM after a 100bp change...

We model economic policy uncertainty (EPU) in the four largest euro area countries by applying machine learning techniques to news articles. The unsupervised machine learning algorithm used makes it possible to retrieve the individual components of overall EPU endogenously for a wide range of...

In this study, U.S. manufacturing firms' profitability measures including profit margins and returns on equity are examined over the 1971-2005 period. We find strong support for the “insulation hypothesis” as our results show that the profitability ratios and the valuation multiples of U.S....

The U.S. Federal Reserve purchased both agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and Treasury securities to conduct quantitative easing (QE). Using micro-level data, we find that banks benefiting from MBS purchases increase mortgage origination, compared to other banks. At the same time, these...

This paper focuses on how the European Central Bank's (ECB) monetary policies influenced non-financial firms. The paper's two main contributions are, first, to shed light on non-financial firms' decisions on leverage, and how the ECB's conventional and unconventional policies may have affected...