This study investigates the rationale for issuing complex securities to retail investors. We focus on a large market of investment products targeted exclusively at households: retail structured products in Europe. We develop an economic measure of product complexity in this market via a text...

This paper provides an overview of supply and demand factors influencing the availability of euro-denominated debt instruments that qualify as high-quality liquid assets (HQLA) in the euro area. The paper estimates the supply of HQLA issued by the public and private sectors as well as the...

The European Central Bank (ECB), as part of its forward-looking strategy, needs high-quality financial market statistical indicators as a means to facilitate evidence-based and sound decision-making. Such indicators include timely market intelligence and information to gauge investors'...

This paper presents a detailed set of new, quantity-based indicators of financial integration in the euro area. The indicators are based on granular data from securities holdings statistics and help us disentangle the main drivers of the portfolio changes observed since the financial crisis....

The Irish economy has experienced a decline in productivity growth over the past decade. This has mostly reflected the poor performance of local firms, with the large productivity gap between foreign-owned and local enterprises having widened. Given the mobility of foreign-owned firms, achieving...

This paper shows that finance has been a key ingredient of long-term economic growth in OECD and G20 countries over the past half-century, but that there can be too much finance. The evidence indicates that at current levels of household and business credit further expansion slows rather than...

Micro, small and medium-sized firms (MSMEs) are a key source of employment and economic growth in Indonesia. They contributed to the country’s economic resilience during the 2008-09 financial crisis. But many suffer from low productivity, curbing their role in boosting living standards. There...

The cost of equity for banks equates to the compensation that market participants demand for investing in and holding banks’ equity, and has important implications for the transmission of monetary policy and for financial stability. Notwithstanding its importance, the cost of equity is...