This paper describes a machine learning technique to timely identify cases of individual bank financial distress. Our work represents the first attempt in the literature to develop an early warning system specifically for small European banks. We employ a machine learning technique, and build a...

This paper aims at investigating the relationship between firms' profit efficiency, access to finance and innovation activities. We enrich our understanding on firms' performance by adopting the stochastic frontier approach (SFA), which allows us to estimate profit functions and to obtain...

We investigate the effect of sovereign stress and of unconventional monetary policy on small firms' financing patterns during the euro area debt crisis. We find that after the crisis started, firms in stressed countries were more likely to be credit rationed, both in the quantity and in the...

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...

This paper analyses the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic shock on small open economies in a monetary union with an application to the euro area. Accounting for a high degree of openness and a strong dependence on intra and extra union trade, we focus on the size and the direction of...

This paper is the first that applies a new measure of competition, the Boone indicator, to the banking industry. This approach is able to measure competition of bank market segments, such as the loan market, whereas many well-known measures of competition can consider the entire banking market...

Monetary policy aims at affecting corporate borrowing by influencing the marginal costs of firms, but its potency can be conditioned by the degree of market competition. We first identify conditions under which changes in marginal costs may have different effects on credit constraints and output...

This paper is the first that applies a new measure of competition, the Boone indicator, to the banking industry. This approach is able to measure competition of bank market segments, such as the loan market, whereas many well - known measures of competition can consider the entire banking market...

The aim of this paper is to improve our understanding of the key determinants of intra- and extra-euro area imports. Using a simultaneous equation estimation framework, and pooling the data across nine euro area countries as an approximation of the euro area, we estimate intra- and extra-euro...

We examine the degree of market power in the big four countries of the euro area using macro and firm micro data. We focus on three main indicators of market power in and across countries: namely, the concentration ratios, the markup and the degree of economic dynamism. For the macro database we...