We show that household leverage is an early and powerful predictor of the 2007 to 2009 recession. Counties in the U.S. that experienced a large increase in household leverage from 2002 to 2006 showed a sharp relative decline in durable consumption starting in the third quarter of 2006 – a full...

This paper presents a dynamic theory of housing market fluctuations. It develops a life-cycle model where households are heteroeneous with respect to income and preferences and mortgage lending is restricted by a down-payment requirement. The market interaction of young credit-constrained...

The paper investigates whether firms have better access to bank credit in areas with a larger degree of urbanization. It uses bank-firm data drawn from the Credit Register maintained at the Bank of Italy to devise an indicator of ease of access to credit. The paper proposes an instrumental...

The purpose of this research is to examine the impact of microfinance bank credit and its debt servicing on the profitability of SMEs in Alimosho Local Government Area, Lagos State, Nigeria. A survey was carried out involving 387 SMEs in Alimosho LGA, Lagos State and information was extracted...

Access to external finance is a key challenge for the creation, survival and growth of SMEs. This article delves into the “weak funding” handicap of rural small firms (SEs): the access to bank financing and the substitutive role of trade credit for entrepreneurs in rural areas when they...

How do changes in market structure impact accessibility to credit? Following the introduction of publicly disclosed Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review stress tests, market shares of affected banks shrunk by about 2.1 pp. Impact significantly differs across regions, with shares dropping an...

Economic hardship is strongly reflected by the housing market. It is the concern of much research, but its analysis is often obstructed by insufficient lagged data. This paper evaluates search intensity for "hardship letter" from Google Insights to detect ensuing mortgage delinquencies. Such...