Small and medium-sized enterprises are a centrepiece of Europe?s economy. Due to their limited size and their generally lower creditworthiness, their access to financial market instruments is more limited than for large enterprises, which benefit from more elaborate Treasury operations,...

This paper analyzes how bank lending to the private nonbank sector responds dynamically to aggregate supply, demand and monetary policy shocks in Germany and the euro area. The results suggest that the dynamic responses in the two areas are broadly similar, although there are some differences in...

Banks play a role in the corporate governance of firms as well as acting as debt financiers around the world. Universal banks can have control over borrowing firms by representation on the board of directors or by holding shares through direct stakes or institutional holdings. We investigate the...

Using recently collected data on Finnish small businesses, we provide evidence that the debt capacity of growth options, defined as the amount of debt that firms optimally raise for an incremental project, is negative, especially in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector. We...

This paper provides evidence that capital market imperfections hold back innovation and growth, and that public policy can complement capital markets. We deliver the evidence by studying the effects of government funding on the behavior of SMEs in Finland. By adapting the methodology recently...

We study the sensitivity of the realised loss-given-default (LGD) to macroeconomic conditions by exploring Global Credit's confidential dataset on observed cash flows from defaulted loans. Given the prolonged duration of loan recovery, spanning several years, and the potential for macroeconomic...

To what extent can private firms' external equity substitute for debt financing in a banking crisis? To answer this question, I use firm-level data and firm-bank linkages to estimate the causal effect of an imported lending cut from a large German bank on firms' capital structure and real...

We provide empirical evidence of the causal effects of changes in financial intermediaries' net worth on the aggregate economy. Our strategy identifies financial shocks as high-frequency changes in the market value of intermediaries' net worth in a narrow window around their earnings...

In this paper, we ask about the capacity of macroprudential policies to reduce the procyclical impact of capital ratio on bank lending. We focus on aggregated macroprudential policy measures and on individual instruments and test whether their effect on the association between lending and...