National borders are still strong barriers for mergers and acquisitions inEurope. We estimate a gravity equation model based on NUTS 2-regionsand find that the restraining impact of national borders decreased byabout a third between 1990 and 2007. However, there has been nosignificant change...

This paper examines the financing structure of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) inGermany and questions whether an equity gap – or, more generally, a financing gap - exists.Reviewing the literature and available data sources, we find that financing constraints seem toaffect, if at...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the dynamic relationships between some key variables for the euro area by means of a systems approach (i.e. so-called Vector Autoregression) and to simulate their responses with respect to monetary policy shocks. The main result is that rather simple...

This paper tackles the issue of the incompleteness of information available to thecentral bank when taking its monetary policy decisions. It is focused on euro areadata and based on the simplistic assumption of the central bank following a simplemonetary policy rule à-la-Taylor. Along the lines...