Public procurement accounts for one third of government spending. In this paper, I document a new mechanism through which government procurement promotes firm growth: firms use procurement contracts to increase the amount of cash-flow based lending. I use Portuguese administrative data over...

Macroprudential policies should strengthen the banking sector throughout the financial cycle. However, while bank credit growth is used to capture cyclical exuberance and calibrate buffer requirements, it depends on potentially heterogeneous dynamics on the borrower and lender sides. By...

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...

The monetary transmission mechanism in the euro area has been adversely affected by the recent crises. Using survey data on thousands of euro area firms, we study factors that affect the access to finance of SMEs. We find that changes in bank funding costs and borrower leverage matter for firms'...

After the global financial crisis and during the European sovereign debt crisis, bank lending to companies in the euro area slowed down dramatically, bringing the economy close to a credit crunch. It was only after the start of the European Central Bank (ECB) quantitative easing programme in...