This paper uses unique SME loan-level data complete with quarterly loan ratings assigned by the lend- ing institution over the period 2008-2010. This allows us to examine the evolution of loan performance throughout the period of economic and financial crisis. We document the shift in the...

This article looks at the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) segment which is regarded as an important contributor to sustainable economic and employment recovery.

In this letter a series of stylized facts are presented on competition in Irish private sector lending markets across periods of both significant economic expansion and decline. Firstly, concentration of lending to the private sector is shown to have fallen during the boom period of 2004-2008,...

Given the imminent re-structuring of the Irish banking sector, an issue of substantial policy importance is that of access to credit for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). As a compliment to ongoing efforts to improve our knowledge of this area using Irish firm-level data, we turn to...

This paper analyses how international outsourcing affects plant productivity, with the major contribution lying in the identification of heterogeneous effects for firms with differing internationalisation status. The results point to a striking pattern: the status of being an outsourcer matters...

The impact of international trade on firm productivity is tested by accounting for firms' import as well as export status for a large panel of Irish manufacturing firms. Two-way traders and exporters-only are found to be the most productive firms, with a significant gap between them and...

An Indirect Exporter is defined as a firm that sells its product to a trade intermediary in its own country, who then goes on to export the good. Despite the numerous appearances of these firms in recent theoretical models, there has been no empirical work comparing these firms to Domestic firms...

Business services firms are increasingly under pressure from foreign competition. We develop an oligopolistic competition model that studies the effect of trade liberalization on exit and sectoral restructuring in the business services sector. We assume that firms are heterogeneous in their...

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...