Senior bank loan officers' expectations for loan demand: Evidence from the Euro-area

We employ senior bank loan officers' responses regarding actual and expected loan demand from enterprises linking successive surveys in order to determine the dominant expectation formation mechanism that best describes European senior bank loan officers’ expectations. We utilize quarterly data for loan demand from enterprises from the European Bank Lending Survey for 14 Euro-area countries spanning the period 2003Q1 to 2019Q4. Our findings suggest that the adaptive expectations mechanism is compatible with senior bank loan officers' expectations for loan demand from enterprises. Our study contributes to the understanding of the formation of loan demand expectations and hence our findings can be very useful for monetary policy purposes

Senior bank loan officers' expectations for loan demand: Evidence from the Euro-area

We employ senior bank loan officers' responses regarding actual and expected loan demand from enterprises linking successive surveys in order to determine the dominant expectation formation mechanism that best describes European senior bank loan officers’ expectations. We utilize quarterly data for loan demand from enterprises from the European Bank Lending Survey for 14 Euro-area countries spanning the period 2003Q1 to 2019Q4. Our findings suggest that the adaptive expectations mechanism is compatible with senior bank loan officers' expectations for loan demand from enterprises. Our study contributes to the understanding of the formation of loan demand expectations and hence our findings can be very useful for monetary policy purposes

Are firms’ expectations on the availability of external finance Rational, Adaptive or Regressive?

This study contributes to the literature of expectation formation mechanisms by bringing new evidence on how non-financial corporations shape their expectations on the availability of external finance. We link consecutive surveys from the Survey on the Access to Finance of Enterprises to investigate which expectation formation mechanism governs Eurozone firms regarding their expectations on the availability of external finance. In line with the past literature, we demonstrate that the Rational Expectations hypothesis is rejected by the data and we find evidence in favor of the Adaptive Expectation mechanism

Bank Deposits Flows and Textual Sentiment: When an ECB President's speech is not just a speech

We investigate whether the so-called textual sentiment has any impact on European depositors’ behavior to withdraw their deposits. After the manual collection of monthly speeches of the president of the European Central Bank (ECB hereafter) we apply textual analysis techniques following the methodology of Loughran and McDonald (2011) and we construct two alternative sentiments able to capture the perceived uncertainty. We find that high frequency of uncertainty and weak modal words in the monthly speeches of the president of the ECB leads both households and non-financial corporations to withdraw their bank deposits. We also find that these textual sentiments have greater impact on non-financial corporations. These findings suggest that regulators and policy makers could expand the already existing early-warning systems for the banking sector by taking into consideration the frequency of uncertainty and weak modal words in the ECB president’s speeches

Management and Resolution methods of Non-performing loans: A Review of the Literature

In the financial crisis of 2007, many banks with high level of Non-performing loans (NPLs) found their sources of capital dried up, which occurred because of bad management. Huge amounts of NPLs imply both a lack of management methods and lack of capital. Also, high NPL levels have resulted to negative effects to banks’ lending activity, making bank officers-managers more concern for the future of the whole banking system. The purpose of this study is twofold. First, to present some NPL management methods that already exist in the literature and second, to make a clear distinction between the ex-post and ex-ante management of NPLs. I tried to collect in one paper what other researchers suggested for the proper management and fight against NPLs for different kinds of banking systems around the world. Hopefully, by examining these methods, banks will be able to cope with the problem of NPLs

The Interplay between Ex-post Credit Risk and the Cycles: Evidence from the Italian banks

The objective of this research is to empirically examine if both credit and business cycle affect the ex-post credit risk (i.e. non-performing loans) in the banking system of Italy. My sample includes 47 Italian banks for the period 1995Q1-2015Q1. The increase in NPLs post-2008 has put into question the robustness of many European banks and the stability of the whole sector. It still remains a serious challenge, especially in Italy which is one of the countries that has been hit by the financial crisis more than other economies. By employing Fixed Effects, Random Effects and GMM as econometric methodologies I find a positive (negative) association between credit cycle (business cycle) and NPLs. Higher NPLs in Italy are due to adverse macroeconomic conditions (i.e. downward phase of the business cycle) and due to excess credit (i.e. upward phase of the credit cycle). Another important finding is that the Italian NPLs have a symmetric sensitivity between both business and credit cycle. Such findings may be helpful for both senior bank loan officers and policy makers when designing macro-prudential as well as NPL resolution policies

Management and Resolution methods of Non-performing loans: A Review of the Literature

In the financial crisis of 2007, many banks with high level of Non-performing loans (NPLs) found their sources of capital dried up, which occurred because of bad management. Huge amounts of NPLs imply both a lack of management methods and lack of capital. Also, high NPL levels have resulted to negative effects to banks’ lending activity, making bank officers-managers more concern for the future of the whole banking system. The purpose of this study is twofold. First, to present some NPL management methods that already exist in the literature and second, to make a clear distinction between the ex-post and ex-ante management of NPLs. I tried to collect in one paper what other researchers suggested for the proper management and fight against NPLs for different kinds of banking systems around the world. Hopefully, by examining these methods, banks will be able to cope with the problem of NPLs

Macroeconomic Determinants of MIR Rate: Evidence from the Euro area

The objective of this study is to examine the determinants of MIR rate in the Euro area for the period 2003Q1-2015Q3. By employing Fixed Effects, Random Effects and Dynamic OLS (DOLS) as econometric methodologies, I examine if the MIR rate is affected by the following macroeconomic factors: unemployment rate, inflation rate, GDP growth, political stability index and wages as % to GDP. All of these factors found to exert great significance to MIR rate and thus they have to be taken into consideration when macro-prudential policies are designing

Keep Your Eye on the Best: Contrastive Regression Transformer for Skill Assessment in Robotic Surgery

This letter proposes a novel video-based, contrastive regression architecture, Contra-Sformer, for automated surgical skill assessment in robot-assisted surgery. The proposed framework is structured to capture the differences in the surgical performance, between a test video and a reference video which represents optimal surgical execution. A feature extractor combining a spatial component (ResNet-18), supervised on frame-level with gesture labels, and a temporal component (TCN), generates spatio-temporal feature matrices of the test and reference videos. These are then fed into an action-aware Transformer with multi-head attention that produces inter-video contrastive features at frame level, representative of the skill similarity/deviation between the two videos. Moments of sub-optimal performance can be identified and temporally localized in the obtained feature vectors, which are ultimately used to regress the manually assigned skill scores. Validated on the JIGSAWS dataset, Contra-Sformer achieves competitive performance (Spearman 0.65 - 0.89), with a normalized mean absolute error between 5.8% - 13.4% on all tasks and across validation setups. Source code and models are available at https://github.com/anastadimi/Contra-Sformer.git

Mapping the Socio-Economic Indicators of Greece from the Implementation of the Monetary Policy and the Tax Administration

The economic crisis that led to a decline in private consumption in the period 2009-2016 is the main factor that has accelerated developments in the country's business map, in the sense that in many cases of business development in Greece there are structural weaknesses revealed by the crisis. This confirms that the country's economic crisis cannot be an alibi for the many problems of the Greek economy.The impact of the economic crisis differs not only between countries where low- and middle-income countries are more affected by developed countries but also within countries. The dramatic decline in wages and pensions has led to a decline in the purchasing power of citizens. The debt crisis, the weakening of demand in the context of addressing the competitiveness of the Greek economy and the significant structural interventions in the labor market, affected supply and demand in the labor market and its participants.The purpose of this paper is to present the social and economic indicators of our country by implementing the policy of the memorandums and the Tax Administration. In particular, a mapping exercise is being undertaken in the period 2009-2016:• The number of starts, change of tax office and business holidays• The business map of our country• Unemployment rates as they have been in our country• The degree of contribution of austerity programs and memorandum policies to addressing unemployment.• The areas and categories of occupations where the highest unemployment rates have occurred.• The role of Tax Administration in addressing these problems