International Economics Commons^™

Small Firms And Domestic Bank Dependence In Europe's Great Recession, Mathias Hoffmann, Bent E. Sorensen

Mathias Hoffmann

The paper studies the role of small businesses (SME) in the transmission of the Eurozone crisis to member countries and whether regions or countries with many SMEs were less able to share risk. Our analysis draws attention to domestic bank dependence---defined as the share of domestic private credit originated by domestic banks---as a key variable modulated the impact of shocks on bank-dependent SMEs and thus on the real economy. We argue that Eurozone banking integration in the years after the creation of the single currency was lopsided in the sense that, until 2008, cross-border lending between banks increased markedly while …