This paper shows that general equilibrium effects can partly rationalize the high correlation between saving and investment rates observed in OECD countries. We find that once controlling for general equilibrium effects the saving-retention coefficient remains high in the 70's but decreases...

This paper provides novel information on the propagation of the pandemic-induced real shock to firms' financial conditions. It uses firm-level survey data from end February to early April 2020 for a large sample of euro area SMEs and large firms. Firms' expectations on the availability of credit...

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...

The Eurosystem staff forecasts are conditional on the financial markets, the global economy and fiscal policy outlook, and include expert judgement. We develop a multi-country BVAR for the four largest countries of the euro area and we show that it provides accurate conditional forecasts of...

This paper studies the relationship between the business cycle and financial intermediation in the euro area. We establish stylized facts and study their stability during the global financial crisis and the European sovereign debt crisis. Long-term interest rates have been exceptionally high and...

Negative monetary policy rates are associated with a particular friction because the remuneration of retail deposits tends to be floored at zero. We investigate whether this friction affects banks' reactions when the policy rate is lowered to negative levels, compared to a standard rate cut in...

Using a small Bayesian dynamic factor model of the euro area we estimate the deviations of output from its trend that are consistent with the behavior of inflation. We label these deviations the output gap. In order to pin-down the features of the model, we evaluate the accuracy of real-time...

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...