This paper uses a new survey-based data set and a model with strong theoretical under-pinnings to explain the characteristics and behaviour of discouraged borrowers in the euro area. The results show that more borrowers are discouraged when the average interest rate charged by banks in a country...

This paper analyses the characteristics and behavior of discouraged borrowers. First, we show that in their discouragement decision, firms trade off their expected return on investment with all borrowing related costs and their rejection likelihood. Second, we predict the approval likelihood of...

We propose a new methodology to recover firm-time varying financial constraints from firms' production behavior. We model financial constraints as the profitability that firms forgo when budget constraints on production inputs bind, impeding them from using the optimal level of inputs and...

This paper uses a non-parametric matching procedure to match survey replies to balance sheet information. It draws on the SAFE survey on access to finance for a sample of 11886 firms in the euro area which are matched with their nearest neighbor in an extended dataset with balance sheet...

Using a novel dataset linking firm level data from the Survey on Access to Finance of Enterprises (SAFE) and bank level data from the Bank Lending Survey (BLS), we explore how changes in credit standards pass through to firms at a granular level. We find that tighter credit standards decrease...