Financial integration, broadly defined as the intensity of cross-border linkages between financial markets, has the potential to channel capital to where it is most productive, bringing many benefits. However, some financial integration is cyclical, increasing economic upswings and declining dur...
Using EIBIS data, this paper shows how firms with higher productivity, before the pandemic, were less likely to cut employment during the crisis, while the adoption of digital technologies was led by firms that were already relatively advanced digital users. Past research suggests that economic ...
This paper investigates the determinants of nominal exchange rates, their volatility, and crash risk in Africa’s lower and lower-middle income countries (LLMICs). It combines macro-panel estimations for 15 African LLMICs with floating or lightly managed exchange rates, with insights from 13 semi...
This paper presents detailed insights into the microstructural characteristics of several African Lower and Lower-Middle Income Countries (LLMICs) foreign exchange markets and the implications of these characteristics for macroeconomic management. It draws on 13 semi-structured interviews with 1...
When firms suffer losses from extreme weather events, such as storms, foods, droughts or landslides, it has implications for their investment plans and the finance their need. This paper investigates the investment and financing decisions of firms that experience monetary losses due to such extr...
The COVID-19 pandemic and its effects affected sectors in different ways, including on the firm-level productivity. Findings show that firms’ responses to the COVID-19 crisis varied within sectors: more productive firms coped with the crisis better in terms of closures and employment adjustments...
This study uses unique firm-level data from EIBIS to identify EU firms' climate strategies and the firm characteristics associated with them. Through a clustering analysis, the these strategies are divided into five distinct clusters, in line with the correspondent literature. We then investigat...
European firms have increasingly invested in training of employees but there are differences between countries and firm types. This paper analyses European firms’ investment in training over the last six years examining trends, factors supporting training investment and the impact of COVID-19. T...
This paper we develop a sovereign default risk index that uses natural language processing techniques and 10 million news articles covering over 100 countries to assess the influence of sovereign default concerns on equity markets. This sovereign default risk index is a high frequency measure of...
Public debt levels are a very weak predictor of a country’s credit rating if a country’s other features are not taken into account. However, everything else equal, more public debt is associated with worse ratings. This paper explores the relationship between debt and sovereign creditworthiness ...
