Slovakia joined the euro area after a period of unprecedented real appreciation. The response to financial crisis combined internal devaluation with productivity increasing measures, including capital deepening in the banking sector. Although this strategy was successfully restoring an external...

In light of the recent financial and economic crisis the present paper analyzes the determinants of loan default. We employ a unique firm-level panel data of 700 bank loans given to small and medium sized enterprises in Slovakia between 2000 and 2005 to investigate three loan default hypothesis....

We analyse trade between countries of the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance in Eastern Europe between 1950 and 1990. Despite central planning of the CMEA, we show that trade could be explained by standard demand factors surprisingly well. We document that the oil price crisis had several...