Financing for working capital and investment is essential for the survival and growth of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). The recent financial crisis has provoked much debate in Ireland and Europe around the provision of bank financing to SMEs. This article provides empirical evidence, using...

While much is known of the magnitude and performance of SME debt in Ireland, up to this point no measure of SME indebtedness has been available for a representative sample of the population. Survey data on the ratio of Debt to Turnover (DT) for Irish SMEs in 2012 and 2013 are presented here,...

An overhang relating to the pre-crisis property investment of Irish Small and Medium Enterprises has been identified as a potential drag on a recovery in employment, investment and output. This Letter aims to provide information from survey and loan-level data which can help to quantify the...

The Prudential Capital Assessment Review (PCAR) 2011 uncovered significant potential losses in the Irish banking sector, leading to a considerable recapitalisation. This letter uses a large sample of the loan level data provided for PCAR 2011 to present descriptive statistics on the SME lending...

This Letter provides an overview of the Central Bank of Ireland's Loan Loss Forecasting framework. This framework, which utilises detailed loan-level data provided on a six-monthly basis by domestic Irish banks, includes internally- developed probability of default (PD) models and a cash ow...

This letter provides a consistent picture of Irish SME credit supply and demand up to March 2012 across two data sources: the European Commission and European Central Bank Survey of Access to Finance of Small and Medium Enterprises (SAFE) and the Mazars SME lending demand survey, commissioned by...

In this letter a series of stylized facts are presented on competition in Irish private sector lending markets across periods of both significant economic expansion and decline. Firstly, concentration of lending to the private sector is shown to have fallen during the boom period of 2004-2008,...

Given the imminent re-structuring of the Irish banking sector, an issue of substantial policy importance is that of access to credit for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). As a compliment to ongoing efforts to improve our knowledge of this area using Irish firm-level data, we turn to...

Macro-prudential policy is designed to address risk at a systemwide level, an example of which is mortgage default following excessive residential property lending in Ireland. Policy tools to address this risk, such as caps on loan- to-value and loan-to-income ratios, are used to build balance...