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...

Drawing from confidential firm-level balance sheets for 17 European countries (13 Euro-Area), the paper documents the newly expanded database of cross-country comparable competitiveness-related indicators built by the Competitiveness Research Network (CompNet). The new database provides...

We show that credit supply shocks have a strong impact on firm-level as well as aggregate investment by applying the methodology developed by Amiti and Weinstein (2013) to a rich dataset of matched bank-firm loans in the Portuguese economy for the period 2005 to 2013. We argue that their...

What determines a country's ability to compete in international markets? What fosters the global competitiveness of its firms? And in the European context, have key elements of the EU strategy such as EMU and enlargement helped or hindered domestic firms' competitiveness in local and global...

This paper uses a Bayesian Structural Vector Autoregressive (BSVAR) framework to estimate the pass-through of unexpected gas price supply shocks on HICP inflation in the euro area and its four largest economies. In comparison to oil price shocks, gas price shocks have approximately one-third...

We focus on the implications of the shale oil boom for the global supply of oil. We begin with a stylized model with two producers, one facing low production costs and one higher production costs but potentially lower adjustment costs, competing á la Stackelberg. We find that the supply...

In a simplified theoretical framework we model the strategic interactions between OPEC and non-OPEC producers and the implications for the global oil market. Depending on market conditions, OPEC may find it optimal to act either as a monopolist on the residual demand curve, to move supply...

In this paper, we assess whether and to what extent financial activity in the oil futures markets has contributed to destabilize oil prices in recent years. We define a destabilizing financial shock as a shift in oil prices that is not related to current and expected fundamentals, and thereby...

In this paper we analyse the relative importance of fundamental and speculative demand on oil futures price levels and volatility. In a first step, we present a theoretical heterogeneous agent model of the oil futures market based on noise trading. We use the model to study the interaction...

This paper evaluates whether macroeconomic uncertainty changes the impact of oil shocks on the oil price. Using a structural threshold VAR model, we endogenously identify different regimes of uncertainty in which we estimate the effects of oil demand and supply shocks. The results show that...