Annalisa Ferrando - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Annalisa Ferrando
Social Science Research Network, 2014
We use a large database of more than 685,000 European firms to show that financial flexibility at... more We use a large database of more than 685,000 European firms to show that financial flexibility attained through conservative leverage policies is more important for private, small, medium-sized and young firms and for firms in countries with lower access to credit and weaker investor protection. Further, using the recent financial crisis as a natural experiment, we show that financial flexibility status allows companies to reduce the negative impact of liquidity shocks on their investment decisions. Our findings support the hypothesis that financial flexibility relates to companies' ability to undertake future investment, despite market frictions hampering possible profitable growth opportunities.
Social Science Research Network, 2011
Social Science Research Network, 2018
Farre-Mensa and Ljungqvist (2016, RFS) argue that the existing and widely used measures of financ... more Farre-Mensa and Ljungqvist (2016, RFS) argue that the existing and widely used measures of financial constraints are inadequate and fail to measure financial constraints. We propose a new methodology to recover firm-year level financial constraints from firms' production behavior. In particular, we measure financial constraints as the profitability that firms forgo when binding constraints on input costs impede them from using the optimal level of inputs and technology. We validate our measure using a unique dataset combining firms' balance sheets from 2005 to 2015 in five Euro Area countries with survey information on firms' self-reported financial constraints, such as actual loan rejections or discouragement. Further, we show that our measure recovers the country-specific trends of financial constraints during the financial crisis and the sovereign debt crisis, and correlates only weakly with the three most popular indices of financial constraints. * The authors would like to thank Nico Dewaelheyns, Angelos Theodorakopoulos, and Silvio Vismara for useful comments. Laurens Cherchye gratefully acknowledges the European Research Council (ERC) for his Consolidator Grant 614221. Bram De Rock gratefully acknowledges the FWO and FNRS for their support. The views expressed are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the European Central Bank or the National Bank of Belgium.
Social Science Research Network, 2015
Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch ge... more Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence.
Social Science Research Network, 2009
Non-technical summary 1 Introduction 2 Literature review and objective of the paper 3 Methodologi... more Non-technical summary 1 Introduction 2 Literature review and objective of the paper 3 Methodological issues and data description 3.1 The model 3.2 Choice of variables 4 Empirical results 4.1 Long-run determinants and short-run dynamics 4.2 Do investors differentiate across the new EU countries? 4.3 Dynamics of fundamental-driven spreads 4.4 Robustness checks
Social Science Research Network, 2009
We also want to thank S. Scopel for her help with the data and two anonymous referees for useful ... more We also want to thank S. Scopel for her help with the data and two anonymous referees for useful comments. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the European Central Bank or the Banco de España.
Page 221. Chapter 8 Bond and Equity Market Integration Lieven Baele and Annalisa Ferrando Introdu... more Page 221. Chapter 8 Bond and Equity Market Integration Lieven Baele and Annalisa Ferrando Introduction This chapter examines the integration process of the different euro area bond and equity markets. Both markets have ...
Intereconomics, Nov 1, 2019
Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch ge... more Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence.
Social Science Research Network, 2012
While many theories of accounts payable and receivable are related to firm performance, there has... more While many theories of accounts payable and receivable are related to firm performance, there has not been a direct test whether firms actively use them to manage their growth. We argue that it is not just the accounts payable but also the accounts receivable that matter. While the former help to alleviate imperfections in the financial market, the latter do so in the product market. Using over 2.5 million observations for 600.000 firms in 8 euro area countries in the period 1993-2009, we show that firms use the trade credit channel to manage growth. In countries where the trade credit channel is more present, the marginal impact is lower, but the total impact is still bigger. Further, firms that are more vulnerable to financial market imperfections, and therefore more likely to be financially constrained, rely more on the trade credit channel to manage growth. Finally, we show that also the overall conditions of the financial market matter for the importance of the trade credit channel for growth.
Social Science Research Network, 2020
This paper should not be reported as representing the views of the European Central Bank (ECB). T... more This paper should not be reported as representing the views of the European Central Bank (ECB). The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the ECB.
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have a central role in the European economy, accounting... more Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have a central role in the European economy, accounting for more than 99.8 percent of all euro area nonfinancial firms, employed 86.8 million people (two-thirds of euro area workforce), and generated about 57.7 percent of value added (European Investment Fund 2014).
Social Science Research Network, 2015
We investigate the impact of the legal system on whether or not firms obtain the credit they appl... more We investigate the impact of the legal system on whether or not firms obtain the credit they apply for. Data comprise unique information provided directly by 48,590 firms from 11 European countries. We look at the strength of creditor protection, the strength of property rights, the time taken to resolve a dispute, the dispute resolution process's costs and the number of procedures the plaintiff faces using data provided by the World Bank and the Heritage Foundation. The results suggest that the more efficient the judicial enforcement system is, and the higher the creditor protection is, the lower the probability that the firms are partially or totally denied credit. Our results are robust to selection bias (Heckman selection) as well as different controls and different estimation techniques. We find that these variables have considerable economic impact: the probability of obtaining credit is up to 40% higher in countries with more robust legal systems.
Journal of Corporate Finance, Apr 1, 2022
Journal of Banking and Finance, Aug 1, 2017
We study the effect of sovereign stress on SMEs' capital structure using restricted-access data f... more We study the effect of sovereign stress on SMEs' capital structure using restricted-access data from the European Central Bank. We find that after the sovereign debt crisis started, and controlling for borrowers' quality, firms in stressed countries became more likely to be credit rationed and to face higher loan rates. At the same time, less creditworthy firms were not more likely to become credit constrained, suggesting no flight to quality in lending. We also find that in order to make up for the decline in bank credit firms in stressed countries began relying considerably more on debt securities.
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2018
The mission of the EIB's Economics Department is to provide economic analyses and studies to supp... more The mission of the EIB's Economics Department is to provide economic analyses and studies to support the Bank in its operations and in its positioning, strategy and policy. The Department, a team of 30 staff, is headed by Debora Revoltella, Director of Economics. Acknowledgments: We would like to thank Debora Revoltella, Maarten Buis, and Rozalia Pal as well as participants at the ECB workshop "Euro area business investment in a global context-the role of cyclical and structural factors and frictions" and at the International Conference on Small Businesses, Banks, Finance, Innovation and Growth 2017 for highly valuable suggestions and comments. This research was conducted while the authors were visiting the EIB, whose hospitality and support are gratefully acknowledged. All errors and omissions remain our own. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the European Investment Bank and of the European Central Bank.
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2015
In the empirical analysis the use of micro-data often encounters confidentiality issues, especial... more In the empirical analysis the use of micro-data often encounters confidentiality issues, especially when data are derived from different countries. One way to tackle this type of problems is known as "distributed micro-data analysis", which proposes an aggregation of data with sufficient information on the distribution of the underlying micro-based data. In this paper we propose an inverse analysis, i.e. a methodology to mimic the anonymised firms' micro-data starting from a distributed micro-dataset and using standard equations and assumptions about the distribution of the residuals that are most likely to reproduce the original micro dataset. As a result this paper offers an easy tool to analyse the firm-level financial ratios, such as firms' leverage, profitability, and productivity performance of firms across country, sector and firm size even when firm-level data are not readily available.
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2019
This paper investigates the links between alternative growth phases of firms and barriers to fina... more This paper investigates the links between alternative growth phases of firms and barriers to financing and investment using firm-level information for a representative sample of EU companies. We propose a novel classification of corporates: high growth (HGEs), stable and declining enterprises. We find that during the phase of high growth, firms are on average more financially constrained. To match their needs for external finance, HGEs are more likely to apply for equity financing. Furthermore, we identify firms with high growth potential. Using survey data, we investigate the barriers to investment activities faced by actual and potential HGEs. Our findings suggest that the most stringent obstacles for actual HGEs are the availability of skilled staff and business regulations, while potential HGEs are blocked by uncertainty about the future.
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2018
The mission of the EIB's Economics Department is to provide economic analyses and studies to supp... more The mission of the EIB's Economics Department is to provide economic analyses and studies to support the Bank in its operations and in its positioning, strategy and policy. The Department, a team of 30 staff, is headed by Debora Revoltella, Director of Economics. Acknowledgments: In preparing this paper, Reinhilde Veugelers worked under a grant from the European Investment Bank. Disclaimer: The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Central Bank or the European Investment Bank.
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2018
Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch ge... more Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence.
Social Science Research Network, 2014
We use a large database of more than 685,000 European firms to show that financial flexibility at... more We use a large database of more than 685,000 European firms to show that financial flexibility attained through conservative leverage policies is more important for private, small, medium-sized and young firms and for firms in countries with lower access to credit and weaker investor protection. Further, using the recent financial crisis as a natural experiment, we show that financial flexibility status allows companies to reduce the negative impact of liquidity shocks on their investment decisions. Our findings support the hypothesis that financial flexibility relates to companies' ability to undertake future investment, despite market frictions hampering possible profitable growth opportunities.
Social Science Research Network, 2011
Social Science Research Network, 2018
Farre-Mensa and Ljungqvist (2016, RFS) argue that the existing and widely used measures of financ... more Farre-Mensa and Ljungqvist (2016, RFS) argue that the existing and widely used measures of financial constraints are inadequate and fail to measure financial constraints. We propose a new methodology to recover firm-year level financial constraints from firms' production behavior. In particular, we measure financial constraints as the profitability that firms forgo when binding constraints on input costs impede them from using the optimal level of inputs and technology. We validate our measure using a unique dataset combining firms' balance sheets from 2005 to 2015 in five Euro Area countries with survey information on firms' self-reported financial constraints, such as actual loan rejections or discouragement. Further, we show that our measure recovers the country-specific trends of financial constraints during the financial crisis and the sovereign debt crisis, and correlates only weakly with the three most popular indices of financial constraints. * The authors would like to thank Nico Dewaelheyns, Angelos Theodorakopoulos, and Silvio Vismara for useful comments. Laurens Cherchye gratefully acknowledges the European Research Council (ERC) for his Consolidator Grant 614221. Bram De Rock gratefully acknowledges the FWO and FNRS for their support. The views expressed are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the European Central Bank or the National Bank of Belgium.
Social Science Research Network, 2015
Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch ge... more Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence.
Social Science Research Network, 2009
Non-technical summary 1 Introduction 2 Literature review and objective of the paper 3 Methodologi... more Non-technical summary 1 Introduction 2 Literature review and objective of the paper 3 Methodological issues and data description 3.1 The model 3.2 Choice of variables 4 Empirical results 4.1 Long-run determinants and short-run dynamics 4.2 Do investors differentiate across the new EU countries? 4.3 Dynamics of fundamental-driven spreads 4.4 Robustness checks
Social Science Research Network, 2009
We also want to thank S. Scopel for her help with the data and two anonymous referees for useful ... more We also want to thank S. Scopel for her help with the data and two anonymous referees for useful comments. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the European Central Bank or the Banco de España.
Page 221. Chapter 8 Bond and Equity Market Integration Lieven Baele and Annalisa Ferrando Introdu... more Page 221. Chapter 8 Bond and Equity Market Integration Lieven Baele and Annalisa Ferrando Introduction This chapter examines the integration process of the different euro area bond and equity markets. Both markets have ...
Intereconomics, Nov 1, 2019
Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch ge... more Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence.
Social Science Research Network, 2012
While many theories of accounts payable and receivable are related to firm performance, there has... more While many theories of accounts payable and receivable are related to firm performance, there has not been a direct test whether firms actively use them to manage their growth. We argue that it is not just the accounts payable but also the accounts receivable that matter. While the former help to alleviate imperfections in the financial market, the latter do so in the product market. Using over 2.5 million observations for 600.000 firms in 8 euro area countries in the period 1993-2009, we show that firms use the trade credit channel to manage growth. In countries where the trade credit channel is more present, the marginal impact is lower, but the total impact is still bigger. Further, firms that are more vulnerable to financial market imperfections, and therefore more likely to be financially constrained, rely more on the trade credit channel to manage growth. Finally, we show that also the overall conditions of the financial market matter for the importance of the trade credit channel for growth.
Social Science Research Network, 2020
This paper should not be reported as representing the views of the European Central Bank (ECB). T... more This paper should not be reported as representing the views of the European Central Bank (ECB). The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the ECB.
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have a central role in the European economy, accounting... more Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have a central role in the European economy, accounting for more than 99.8 percent of all euro area nonfinancial firms, employed 86.8 million people (two-thirds of euro area workforce), and generated about 57.7 percent of value added (European Investment Fund 2014).
Social Science Research Network, 2015
We investigate the impact of the legal system on whether or not firms obtain the credit they appl... more We investigate the impact of the legal system on whether or not firms obtain the credit they apply for. Data comprise unique information provided directly by 48,590 firms from 11 European countries. We look at the strength of creditor protection, the strength of property rights, the time taken to resolve a dispute, the dispute resolution process's costs and the number of procedures the plaintiff faces using data provided by the World Bank and the Heritage Foundation. The results suggest that the more efficient the judicial enforcement system is, and the higher the creditor protection is, the lower the probability that the firms are partially or totally denied credit. Our results are robust to selection bias (Heckman selection) as well as different controls and different estimation techniques. We find that these variables have considerable economic impact: the probability of obtaining credit is up to 40% higher in countries with more robust legal systems.
Journal of Corporate Finance, Apr 1, 2022
Journal of Banking and Finance, Aug 1, 2017
We study the effect of sovereign stress on SMEs' capital structure using restricted-access data f... more We study the effect of sovereign stress on SMEs' capital structure using restricted-access data from the European Central Bank. We find that after the sovereign debt crisis started, and controlling for borrowers' quality, firms in stressed countries became more likely to be credit rationed and to face higher loan rates. At the same time, less creditworthy firms were not more likely to become credit constrained, suggesting no flight to quality in lending. We also find that in order to make up for the decline in bank credit firms in stressed countries began relying considerably more on debt securities.
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2018
The mission of the EIB's Economics Department is to provide economic analyses and studies to supp... more The mission of the EIB's Economics Department is to provide economic analyses and studies to support the Bank in its operations and in its positioning, strategy and policy. The Department, a team of 30 staff, is headed by Debora Revoltella, Director of Economics. Acknowledgments: We would like to thank Debora Revoltella, Maarten Buis, and Rozalia Pal as well as participants at the ECB workshop "Euro area business investment in a global context-the role of cyclical and structural factors and frictions" and at the International Conference on Small Businesses, Banks, Finance, Innovation and Growth 2017 for highly valuable suggestions and comments. This research was conducted while the authors were visiting the EIB, whose hospitality and support are gratefully acknowledged. All errors and omissions remain our own. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the European Investment Bank and of the European Central Bank.
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2015
In the empirical analysis the use of micro-data often encounters confidentiality issues, especial... more In the empirical analysis the use of micro-data often encounters confidentiality issues, especially when data are derived from different countries. One way to tackle this type of problems is known as "distributed micro-data analysis", which proposes an aggregation of data with sufficient information on the distribution of the underlying micro-based data. In this paper we propose an inverse analysis, i.e. a methodology to mimic the anonymised firms' micro-data starting from a distributed micro-dataset and using standard equations and assumptions about the distribution of the residuals that are most likely to reproduce the original micro dataset. As a result this paper offers an easy tool to analyse the firm-level financial ratios, such as firms' leverage, profitability, and productivity performance of firms across country, sector and firm size even when firm-level data are not readily available.
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2019
This paper investigates the links between alternative growth phases of firms and barriers to fina... more This paper investigates the links between alternative growth phases of firms and barriers to financing and investment using firm-level information for a representative sample of EU companies. We propose a novel classification of corporates: high growth (HGEs), stable and declining enterprises. We find that during the phase of high growth, firms are on average more financially constrained. To match their needs for external finance, HGEs are more likely to apply for equity financing. Furthermore, we identify firms with high growth potential. Using survey data, we investigate the barriers to investment activities faced by actual and potential HGEs. Our findings suggest that the most stringent obstacles for actual HGEs are the availability of skilled staff and business regulations, while potential HGEs are blocked by uncertainty about the future.
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2018
The mission of the EIB's Economics Department is to provide economic analyses and studies to supp... more The mission of the EIB's Economics Department is to provide economic analyses and studies to support the Bank in its operations and in its positioning, strategy and policy. The Department, a team of 30 staff, is headed by Debora Revoltella, Director of Economics. Acknowledgments: In preparing this paper, Reinhilde Veugelers worked under a grant from the European Investment Bank. Disclaimer: The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Central Bank or the European Investment Bank.
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2018
Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch ge... more Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence.