This paper presents new evidence on the importance of insolvency frameworks for private sector debt deleveraging and for the resolution of non-performing loans (NPL). We construct an aggregate insolvency framework index (IFI), which is used as explanatory variable in the empirical analysis. By...

We use an industrial organisation approach to quantify the size of Total Factor Productivity Growth (TFPG) for euro area banks after the crisis and decompose it into its main driving factors. In addition, we disentangle permanent and time-varying inefficiency in the banking sector. This is...

The objective of this paper is to investigate which factors - macroeconomic, policy - related or institutional - foster the implementation of structural reforms. To this objective, we look at episodes of structural reforms over three decades across 40 OECD and EU countries and link them to such...

What drives external performance of countries? This is a recurring question in academia and policy. The factors underlying export growth are receiving great attention, as countries struggle to grow out of the crisis by increasing exports and as protectionist discourses take foot again. Despite...

We assess the ability of yield curve factors to predict risk premia in short-term interest rates and exchange rates across a large sample of major advanced economies. We find that the same tick-shaped linear combination of (relative) bond yields predicts risk premia in both short-term interest...

This paper analyses the consumer's decision to apply for credit and the probability of the credit being accepted in the euro area during a period characterized by the unprecedented concomitance of events and changing borrowing conditions linked to the global COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian...

This paper investigates the contribution of capital markets to international risk sharing in the euro area over the 2000Q1-2021Q1 period. It provides three main contributions: First, the estimation of country-specific vector autoregressions (VAR) shows that shock absorption through capital...

We analyse the impact of macroeconomic and monetary policy shocks on corporate credit risk as measured by firms' probabilities of default (PDs) for the four largest euro area countries. We estimate the impact of shocks on one-year PDs using local projections (LP). For the period 2014-19, we find...

Banks in the euro area can generate high-quality liquid assets (HQLA) by borrowing central bank reserves from the Eurosystem against non-HQLA collateral. This paper quantifies the extent of this liquidity transformation and finds that on average EUR 0.92 of net HQLA are generated for each euro...

We review the determinants of the discretionary fiscal policy action of governments in the euro area and in other advanced economies during the past 20 years. This is done by estimating fiscal reaction functions using dynamic panel techniques and country-by-country estimates. The results suggest...