Drawing from confidential firm-level balance sheets in 11 European countries, the paper presents a novel sectoral database of comparable productivity indicators built by members of the Competitiveness Research Network (CompNet) using a newly developed research infrastructure. Beyond aggregate...

Using a novel dataset linking firm level data from the Survey on Access to Finance of Enterprises (SAFE) and bank level data from the Bank Lending Survey (BLS), we explore how changes in credit standards pass through to firms at a granular level. We find that tighter credit standards decrease...

This paper provides new survey evidence on firms' inflation expectations in the euro area. Building on the ECB's Survey on the Access to Finance of Enterprises (SAFE), we introduce consistent measurement of inflation expectations across countries and shed new light on the properties and causal...

We study the relation between firms financial structure, access to external finance and labor productivity using a unique dataset of firm-level data for several euro area countries during the period 1995-2011. The empirical strategy is twofold. First we build a synthetic indicator of financial...

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...

We investigate the role of the judicial system on whether or not the firms obtain the credit they applied for, by looking at the strength of the creditor protection, the strength of property rights, the time for resolving a dispute, its costs and the number of procedures the plaintiff faces. We...

This paper analyzes the performance of global value chains during the trade collapse. To do so, it exploits a unique transaction-level dataset on French firms containing information on cross-border monthly transactions matched with data on worldwide intrafirm linkages as defined by property...

We explore the nature of Business Groups, that is network-like forms of hierarchical organization between legally autonomous …rms spanning both within and across national borders. Exploiting a unique dataset of 270,474 headquarters controlling more than 1,500,000 (domestic and foreign) a¢...

As policy-makers refocus on growth, there is an urgent need to enhance our understanding of the factors at the root of competitiveness, in order to improve the appropriateness and precision of policy design. This policy brief argues that traditional aggregate indicators, such as unit labour...