The euro area sovereign debt crisis has highlighted the importance of reducing public debt levels and building up sufficient fiscal buffers during normal and good times. It has also reaffirmed the need for a thorough debt sustainability analysis (DSA) to act as a warning system for national...

The world has been struck by a mutating systemic financial crisis that is unprecedented in terms of financial losses and fiscal costs, geographic reach, and speed and synchronisation. The crisis from August 2007 to date can be divided into three main phases: the financial turmoil from August...

This report analyses the financial position of non-financial enterprises in the euro area, in particular the amount of external financing, the choice between debt and equity and the composition and maturity structure of debt. It aims at identifying the main features of the euro area, as well as...

This report analyses the main developments in housing finance in the euro area in the decade, covering the period from 1999 to 2007. It looks at mortgage indebtedness, various characteristics of loans for house purchase, the funding of such loans and the spreads between the interest rates on...

We present a comparable set of results on the monetary transmission channels on firm investment for the four largest euro-area countries (Germany, France, Italy and Spain). With particularly rich micro datasets for each country containing over 215,000 observations from 1985 to 1999, we explore...

This paper studies the effects of monetary policy on the investment behaviour of various categories of Italian firms, using a panel from the Company Accounts Data Service (Centrale dei Bilanci). The exercise aims to shed light on the quantitative importance of a channel of transmission operating...

We present a comparable set of results on the monetary transmission channels on firm investment for the four largest countries of the euro area (Germany, France, Italy and Spain). With particularly rich micro datasets for each country containing over 215,000 observations from 1985 to 1999, we...

The recent global financial crisis has put the spotlight on macro-prudential policies to protect firms and households from problems emanating from the financial sector. This paper proposes an analytical framework that combines exogenous and endogenous risks, the latter seen as stemming from...