Drawing from confidential firm-level balance sheets in 11 European countries, the paper presents a novel sectoral database of comparable productivity indicators built by members of the Competitiveness Research Network (CompNet) using a newly developed research infrastructure. Beyond aggregate...

This paper provides a new cross-country evaluation of competitiveness, focusing on the linkages between productivity and export performance among European economies. We use the information compiled in the Trade module of CompNet to establish new stylized facts regarding the joint distributions...

This paper tries a conceptual framing of the issue of financial stability in economic theory and also to identify solutions to address episodes of financial instability. An essential reference is Minsky's financial instability hypothesis, which argues that a fundamental feature of the financial...

This paper presents a framework for credit risk modeling of the household sector that follows a top-down approach using panel techniques. The results indicate that the determinants of default on bank loans are unemployment, exchange rate, industrial production, indebtedness and interest rate...

This paper combines results of a questionnaire survey with firm level data in order to better explain firm competitiveness. To do this, survey-based information about perceived factors is used to improve explanatory power of quantitative factors. Results from the firm level panel data model...

The paper investigates the impact of foreign currency lending on investment. Using Hungarian firm level data, we test whether foreign currency lending contributed to larger investment before the crisis and whether the depreciation during the Great Recession resulted in lower investment rate for...

Our analysis of micro data shows that the size of unhedged foreign currency lending has become significant not just in the household sector, but in the corporate sector as well. The weight of foreign currency debtors without net foreign currency income was significant prior to the crisis. During...

The paper investigates the impact of foreign currency lending in the Hungarian corporate sector on real investment. Using a rich micro dataset we consider two questions. First we test whether foreign currency (FX) lending – by lowering user cost and easing liquidity constraints – contributed...

This paper investigates currency mismatch in the Hungarian corporate sector. Using a novel dataset on non-financial firms we first identify firms with mismatch, measure their weight in the economy and show their main characteristics. We then analyze the performance of firms during the crisis. We...