This paper analyzes corporate vulnerabilities in the Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan (MENAP hereafter) in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic shock. Using a sample of nearly 700 firms from eleven countries in MENAP, we assess the non-financial corporate (NFC) sector's liquidity and solvency...

This article examines the interrelations among five ownership and board characteristics in a sample of 260 banks and Savings-and-Loan Holding Companies (SLHCs). These governance characteristics, designed to reduce agency problems between shareholders and managers are insider ownership,...

On March 10, 2016, the European Central Bank (ECB) announced the Corporate Sector Purchase Programme (CSPP) - commonly known as corporate quantitative easing (QE) - to improve the financing conditions of the Eurozone's real economy and strengthen the pass-through of unconventional monetary...

This paper investigates the behaviour of credit rating agencies (CRAs) using a natural experiment in monetary policy. Specifically, we exploit the corporate QE of the Eurosystem and its rating-based specific design which generates exogenous variation in the probability for a bond of becoming...

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in an unprecedented shock to firms with adverse consequences for existing productive capacities. At the same time, digitalization has increasingly been touted as a key pathway for mitigating economic losses from the pandemic, and we expect firms facing digital...

This paper investigates the behaviour of credit rating agencies (CRAs) using a natural experiment in monetary policy. Specifically, we exploit the corporate QE of the Eurosystem and its rating-based specific design which generates exogenous variation in the probability for a bond of becoming...

This paper investigates to what extent low-income developing countries (LIDCs) characterized as frontier markets (FMs) have begun to be subject to capital flows dynamics typically associated with emerging markets (EMs). Using a sample of developing countries covering the period 2000-14, we show...