The paper investigates EU banks' profitability through the recent financial cycle using banklevel balance sheet and income statement data. We find that banks that were more successful at protecting their profits had a less pronounced deterioration in loan quality and a larger improvement in cost...

Corporate sector vulnerabilities have been a central policy topic since the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we analyze some 17,000 publicly listed firms in a sample of 24 countries, and assess their ability to withstand shocks induced by the pandemic to their liquidity, viability...