In the decade following the introduction of the euro, many Southern EMU members experienced sizeable capital inflows. We document how, instead of contributing to convergence, these flows mainly fueled growth of the nontradable sectors. We rationalize these developments using a tractable...

This paper examines how the materialization of credit defaults affects the real economy. I estimate a DSGE model including banks, firms and financial frictions using euro area data. The estimation results show that a positive credit default shock, which is identified as an unanticipated increase...

This paper examines how credit risk affects bank lending and the business cycle. We estimate a panel Vector Autoregression model for an unbalanced sample of 12 OECD countries over the past two to three decades, consisting of the output gap, inflation, the short-term interest rate, bank lending,...

Since the 1980s, the global banking sector has been characterized by three trends: i) a secular decline in interest rates, ii) a reallocation of bank investments from corporate loans towards mortgages and iii) the rise of shadow banking relative to regulated banking. This paper builds a general...

The article analyses recent developments in business investment for a large group of EU countries, using a broad set of analytical tools and data sources. We find that the assessment of whether or not investment is currently low varies across benchmarks and countries. At the euro area level and...