We provide new insights into the relationship between financial market tightness and real activity, using a new database of corporate bonds issued in eight European countries. Bond spreads have a significant negative relationship with four real activity variables at horizons 1-8 quarters ahead. The relationship is robust to adding measures of monetary policy tightness and leading indicators, providing strong support for models previously only evaluated on US data. A subset of northern European countries have similar sensitivity of real GDP to bond spreads, but others have greater sensitivity to bond spreads, revealing diverse responses in Europe to financial market tightness.

In this paper we provide first-hand evidence that leadership quality matters for the quality of healthcare provision, based on NHS England hospital trust data between 2010 and 2014. This is the first paper to study this relationship using individual leadership styles, namely, task-, relations-, change-and integrity-oriented, and for different metrics of quality of healthcare provision, including staff and patient satisfaction survey measures and clinical performance indicators. We find that task-oriented leadership has the strongest relationship with staff-rated hospital quality while change-oriented leadership relates most to patient satisfaction and the clinical measure. We also find some evidence that organizational autonomy and competition across hospitals moderates the effect of leadership quality on healthcare quality. Overall, our results indicate that ideal healthcare leaders should behave as integrated leaders and that leadership matters at all levels of organizational hierarchy. This has important policy implications for continued support for the development and funding of integrated leadership programs in healthcare.

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