How actively households participate in the financial markets, decides to a large extent, the synchronisation between the real and financial side of an economy. Digitalisation, by way of improving the accessibility to financial markets, can lead to an increase in this synchronisation. In this...

Do financial constraints amplify or dampen the transmission of monetary policy to the real economy? To answer this question, we propose a simple empirical strategy that combines (i) firm-level employment and balance sheet data, (ii) identified monetary policy shocks and (iii) survey data on...

Small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) of southern euro-area economies (e.g. Italy, Spain) pay significantly higher borrowing rates than their peers of the core (e.g. Germany, France) and this divergence is widening. It is argued that severe market failures prevent SMEs in southern euro area...