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 aims at analyzing the impact of Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) on firms' investment policies in the contemporaneous presence of financial imperfections. Our results show that investment is significantly affected by the presence of both market imperfections; they are robust to...

type="main" xml:lang="en" <p>The multimarket contact hypothesis holds that more contacts between firms competing in the same markets may induce more collusion. This paper tests the hypothesis for the Italian banking market, analysing the behaviour of the largest Italian banks from 1990 to 1996....</p>

In this paper, we present a set of specific measures to quantify the state and evolution of financial integration in the euro area. Five key markets are considered, namely the money, corporate bond, government bond, credit and equity markets. Building upon the law of one price, we developed two...

For the period 2001-8, we propose an empirical assessment of the determinants of borrowing costs of new European Union member countries. The results of a dynamic panel error-correction model, accounting for both common long-run determinants and cross-country heterogeneities suggest that...

This paper investigates the financing conditions of non-financial corporations in the euro area. We develop a new firm classification based on micro-data by distinguishing between three groups of firms: unconstrained, relatively and absolutely constrained firms. We also provide further evidence...

While many theories of accounts payable and receivable are related to firm performance, there has not been a direct test whether firms actively use them to manage their growth. We argue that it is not just the accounts payable but also the accounts receivable that matter. While the former help...