This paper examines the extent to which bank market power alleviates or magnifies SME credit constraints using a large panel dataset of more than 118,000 SMEs across 20 European countries over the period 2005-2008. To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine bank market power and SME...

In this paper, we use new survey data on the Irish SME population to trace out the impact of the pandemic on firms' revenues, their capacity to adjust their cost base and their usage of policy supports. Between March and October 2020 over 70 per cent of firms experienced some fall in turnover...

The financial crisis has brought to the fore concerns regarding small- and medium-sized enterprises' (SMEs) capacity to access traditional bank lending. Using European firm-level data on SME access to finance since the onset of the financial crisis, we find that bank-lending constrained SMEs are...

Our research tests the difference in investment efficiency between state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and private firms and then evaluates the effect of privatisation and equitisation policies on the investment efficiency of former state owned enterprises (SOEs). We use a novel dataset from Viet Nam...

This paper models the immediate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Irish SMEs and extrapolates forward their performance as restrictions ease. Our baseline scenario shows a steady recovery path for the median firm. However, indicators of financial difficulties remain persistently high with the...

This working paper provides an updated overview of the financial block satellite model in COSMO. This block allows for an analysis of macrofinancial relationships and links these back into the main COSMO specification. The critical importance of appropriately assessing macro-financial linkages...

The war in Ukraine and the subsequent increase in energy and other commodity prices has dampened the economic outlook. There are increased downside risks to economic activity and there is also considerable uncertainty around any economic projections and how they may evolve in the future. This...

In this paper, we explore the impact of recent interest rate increases on the Irish economy and chart out the potential impact using scenarios for the period 2023- 2025. We use the COSMO macroeconometric model of the Irish economy to test the impacts through credit markets and the real economy,...

In this paper, we use novel firm-level microdata for Ireland to explore the factors that determine the investment in digitalisation for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). More specifically, we use cross-sectional survey data to explore whether firm fundamentals or constraints act...

Numerous research papers have used Irish-only data to test for the presence of an investment gap for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In this paper, we use cross country firm-level survey data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys to explore the investment patterns of Irish SMEs in a...