Innovative firms with good ideas may still struggle to fine-tune them to the stage where they can attract outside funding. We conduct a five-country randomized experiment that tests the impact of an investment readiness program. Firms then pitched their ideas to independent judges. The program...

Payment scale economies affect banking costs, competition in payment services, and pricing. Our scale measure relates operating cost to physical measures of European banking "output", finding large economies. This differs from relating total cost to the value of balance sheet assets (the...

Using a comprehensive database of European firms, we study how private equity affects the rate of firm entry. We find that private equity investment benefits new business incorporation, especially in industries with naturally higher entry rates and R&D intensity. A two standard deviation...

This paper illustrates the main features of the Labour Module of the CompNet dataset which provides indicators of firm growth over the period 1995-2012 across 17 EU (13 euro area) countries and 9 macro-sectors. It also includes information on a large set of micro-aggregated characteristics of...

We estimate the degree of 'stickiness' in aggregate consumption growth (sometimes interpreted as reflecting consumption habits) for thirteen advanced economies. We find that, after controlling for measurement error, consumption growth has a high degree of autocorrelation, with a stickiness...

We estimate the euro area output gap by applying the Beveridge-Nelson decomposition based on a large Bayesian vector autoregression. Our approach incorporates multivariate information through the inclusion of a wide range of variables in the analysis and addresses data issues associated with the...

In this paper, we study the dynamics and drivers of sovereign bond yields in euro area countries using a factor model with time-varying loading coeffi cients and stochastic volatility, which allows for capturing changes in the pricing mechanism of bond yields. Our key contribution is exploring...

We contribute to the empirical literature on the impact of shocks to bank capital in the euro area by estimating a Bayesian VAR model identified with sign restrictions. The variables included in the VAR are those typically used in monetary policy analysis, extended to include aggregate banking...

We use a Bayesian stochastic search variable selection structural VAR model to investigate the heterogeneous impact of housing demand shocks on the macro-economy and the role of house prices in the monetary policy transmission, across euro area countries. A novel set of identification...