This paper investigates the link between corporate debt and investment for a group of five peripheral euro area countries. Using firm-level data from 2005-2014, we postulate a non-linear corporate leverage-investment relationship and derive thresholds beyond which leverage has a negative and...

This paper analyses the implications of corporate indebtedness for investment following large economic shocks. The empirical analysis is based on a large Orbis-iBACH firm-level data set for euro area countries from 2005 to 2018. Our results suggest that investment of high-debt firms is...

We present evidence that referenda have a significant, detrimental outcome on investment. Employing an unsupervised machine learning algorithm over the period 2008-2017, we construct three important uncertainty indices underlying reports in the Scottish news media: Scottish independence...

We investigate financing constraints in a large cross-country data set covering most of the European economy. Firm level investment sensitivity to cash flow is used to identify financing constraints. We find that the sensitivities are significantly positive on average, controlling for country...

We study the transmission of (unconventional) monetary policy to the real sector when firm decisions depend on both current and future credit market conditions. For a given level of current credit access, investment and employment increases more at firms expecting bank credit to improve in the...

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...

In this paper, we investigate the economy-wide effects of the collateral channel by exploiting: (i) a legal reform in Sweden in 2004 that reduced collateral values, and (ii) a dataset that covers all incorporated firms in Sweden over the period 2000-2006. We find that the loss in collateral...

In this paper, we investigate the economy-wide effects of the collateral channel by exploiting: (i) a legal reform in Sweden in 2004 that reduced collateral values, and (ii) a dataset that covers all incorporated firms in Sweden over the period 2000-2006. We find that the loss in collateral...

The excess sensitivity of investment to cash flow has been demonstrated in numerous studies. Recent research has identified differences in the degree of sensitivity across countries, which it ascribes to the nature of the lender-borrower relationship in the financial systems of those countries....

We use the recent financial crisis period to analyse the effect of bank credit tightening on real firm investment. We derive a new set of credit tightening indexes from the ECB Bank Lending Survey. Combining these with annual balance sheet data from Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium and...