Governments, central banks and development banks around the world have a long history of intervention in the credit market for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). These interventions are justified by economic research which has found that enterprises facing credit constraints are less...

type="main" xml:id="ecpo12034-abs-0001" <p>We examine the effect of domestic political accountability on leaders' strategies for attracting foreign direct investment to less developed countries. We consider two policy areas: the tax burden imposed on firms and the regulatory environment in which...</p>

This report analyses and reviews the corporate finance structure of non-financial corporations (NFCs) in the euro area, including how they interact with the macroeconomic environment. Special emphasis is placed on the crisis that began in 2007-08, thus underlining the relevance of financing and...

This paper presents a framework for estimating losses for residential mortgage loans.At the core is a transitions-based probability of default model which yields directly observ- able cash-fl ows at the loan level. The estimated model includes coefficients on unemployment, Loan to Value ratio...

This Letter provides an overview of the Central Bank of Ireland's Loan Loss Forecasting framework. This framework, which utilises detailed loan-level data provided on a six-monthly basis by domestic Irish banks, includes internally- developed probability of default (PD) models and a cash ow...

Using unique borrower-level balance sheet information for a cross-section of 6,000 Irish SME loans, this paper tests the determinants of default at the micro level. Typical financial ratios, such as the ratio of the loan to total assets, the current ratio, leverage ratio, liquidity ratio and...

This letter provides a consistent picture of Irish SME credit supply and demand up to March 2012 across two data sources: the European Commission and European Central Bank Survey of Access to Finance of Small and Medium Enterprises (SAFE) and the Mazars SME lending demand survey, commissioned by...

The extension of credit to SMEs in Ireland has been identified as a necessary condition for economic recovery and job growth. The debate on whether the reduction in credit to this sector is caused by credit rationing by banks or a lack of credit demand on the part of SMEs has received much...

The causality from outsourcing, defined as the procurement of inputs from outside the boundaries of the firm, to productivity is tested for a large panel of Irish manufacturing firms. Theory suggests that as firms outsource more 'non-core' activities to specialized providers, productivity due to...

This paper considers the relationship between democratic accountability in de- veloping countries and the policies they use to attract foreign direct investment (FDI). We isolate two policy areas that governments of developing countries use to attract FDI: the tax burden on firms and the...