This paper examines whether political connections ease financial constraints faced by firms. Using firm-level data from six Central and Eastern European economies, the paper shows that politically connected firms: (i) have high levels of leverage, (ii) have low levels of profitability, (iii) are...

The policy response to the COVID-19 shock included regulatory easing across many jurisdictions to facilitate the flow of credit to the economy and mitigate a further ampli-fication of the shock through tighter financial conditions. Using an intraday event study,this paper examines how stock...

Understanding the impact of climate mitigation policies is key to designing effective carbon pricing tools. We use institutional features of the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) and high-frequency data on more than 2,000 publicly listed European firms over 2011-21 to study the impact of carbon...

Understanding the impact of climate mitigation policies is key to designing effective carbon pricing tools. We use institutional features of the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) and high-frequency data on more than 2,000 publicly listed European firms over 2011-21 to study the impact of carbon...

This paper presents principles that could guide the design of more targeted policy support and facilitate the restructuring of firms adversely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. To this end, the paper takes stock of vulnerabilities and risks in the enterprise sector and assesses countries'...

We study the impact of the COVID-19 recession on capital structure of publicly listed U.S. firms. Our estimates suggest leverage (Net Debt/Asset) decreased by 5.3 percentage points from the pre-shock mean of 19.6 percent, while debt maturity increased moderately. This de-leveraging effect is...

We examine how debt rollover risk affects firms' capital structure following aggregate economic shocks. Using the COVID-19 shock and a text-based measure of earnings calls, we find firms increase leverage by 7.4 percentage points when they are highly exposed to both rollover risk as well as...