1st FINPRO - Finance and Productivity Conference
1st FINPRO - Finance and Productivity Conference The Great Financial Crisis of 2007/2008 still casts a shadow on many developed economies in terms of real outcomes, such as…
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2nd FINPRO - Finance and Productivity Conference
2nd FINPRO - Finance and Productivity Conference A conference jointly organised by the Competitiveness Research Network (CompNet), the European Bank for Reconstruction and…
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2020 Annual Conference of the OECD Global Forum of Productivity
2020 Annual Conference of the OECD Global Forum of Productivity This year CompNet celebrates its 10th Annual Conference, together with Banque de France as co-host, which will…
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8th CompNet Annual Conference
From Micro to Macro: Market Power, Firms’ Heterogeneity and Investment 8th Annual Conference of CompNet, jointly organized with IMF, EIB, ENRI and IWH, March 18-19 2019, European…
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7th CompNet Annual Conference
Economic Growth, Trade and Productivity Dispersion 7 th CompNet Annual Conference, June 21-22, 2018, Leopoldina, Halle (Saale), Germany The main target of this conference was to…
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Past Events
Past Events 14. CompNet Annual Conference (Vilnius, 25-26 September 2025) The 14th CompNet Annual Conference, co-hosted with the Bank of Lithuania, took place on 25–26 September…
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6th vintage
6th Vintage CompNet Dataset CompNet has created a competitiveness indicator dataset including a number of European countries. The dataset is unique in terms of its coverage and…
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The Network
About IWH CompNet The Competitiveness Research Network (CompNet) is a leading European research initiative dedicated to advancing the understanding of competitiveness and…
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12.08.2025 • 24/2025
20 years after Hurricane Katrina: Church membership contributed significantly to economic recovery
Katrina and other hurricanes caused devastating damage in the south-east of the USA in the summer of 2005. A study by the Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH) shows: in the years following the disaster, establishments in counties with higher rates of church membership saw a significantly stronger recovery in terms of productivity.
Felix Noth
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Corporate Loan Spreads and Economic Activity
Anthony Saunders, Alessandro Spina, Sascha Steffen, Daniel Streitz
Review of Financial Studies,
Vol. 38 (2),
2025
Abstract
We use secondary corporate loan-market prices to construct a novel loan-market-based credit spread. This measure has considerable predictive power for economic activity across macroeconomic outcomes in both the U.S. and Europe and captures unique information not contained in public market credit spreads. Loan-market borrowers are compositionally different and particularly sensitive to supply-side frictions as well as financial frictions that emanate from their own balance sheets. This evidence highlights the joint role of financial intermediary and borrower balance-sheet frictions in understanding macroeconomic developments and enriches our understanding of which type of financial frictions matter for the economy.
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