This study constructs a financial stress index for Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Russia and examines the relationship between financial stress and economic activity. The financial stress index incorporates banking sector fragility, time varying stock market return...

We use two data sets to study how country and firm characteristics affected firms’ financial constraints and their likelihood of survival during the early phase of the recent global financial crisis in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ECA), a region that was especially hard hit. The first data...