We study how private equity (PE) buyouts propagate through supply chains using unique firm-to-firm transactions data from Belgium. In normal times, suppliers of PE-backed firms outperform their peers by 5%–10% in employment and sales growth, primarily due to increased input demand from PE-backed customers rather than knowledge spillovers or other mechanisms. In economic downturns, however, this outperformance is attenuated and suppliers compress markups by around 8% as PE investors intensify bargaining pressure and reconfigure supply chains to extract cost savings.

Equality runs deeper than economics textbooks or policy fashions suggest. Across disciplines, evidence increasingly links more equal societies to stronger well-being, greater social trust, and healthier democracies, challenging the assumption that fairness must come at the expense of prosperity or economic dynamism.

We empirically analyse the role of judgement in assigning overall scores by the euro area supervisors as part of the yearly Supervisory Review and Evaluation Process (SREP), which evaluates banks’ risks and sets supervisory actions. We also analyse its role in shaping the drivers of the Pillar 2 capital requirement (P2R) that banks must fulfil. We find that supervisors actively adjust the weight of the components of the overall score to reflect qualitative information, thereby smoothing fluctuations in the final assessment.

This paper studies the impact on cashflows and financial decisions of firms affected by wildfires, focusing on the wildfires that occurred in Portugal in 2017. Using establishment-level data from the hotel industry combined with geospatial information on wildfire proximity and land use, we employ a difference-in-differences approach to study both directly and indirectly affected firms.