Governments, central banks and development banks around the world have a long history of intervention in the credit market for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). These interventions are justified by economic research which has found that enterprises facing credit constraints are less...

This paper examines the changing manner in which Irish financial institutions set their variable interest rates over the period 2003 - 2011. In particular, the onset of the financial crisis clearly results in a break in the pass-through relationship between market rates and variable rates at the...

The monetary conditions index (MCI) was developed in the early 1990s with the aim of capturing two of the important monetary transmission channels by combining both interest rates and exchange rates. This article examines the development of the MCI and explores the difficulties with implementing...

The post-2008 period in the euro area was characterised by sharp dispersion in borrowing costs faced by firms, across both countries and firm types. This dispersion was an important manifestation of the "financial fragmentation" which hampered the smooth transmission of accommodative monetary...

We exploit differences in the number and distribution of natural resources to estimate the presence of a curse of natural resources on economic growth. Building on a sample of 93 developing and developed countries covering the years 1980 to 2007, we show that, given the value of the resource...