The multimarket contact hypothesis holds that more contacts between firms competing in the same markets may induce more collusion. This paper tests the hypothesis for the Italian banking market, analysing the behaviour of the largest Italian banks from 1990 to 1996. Market rivalry is gauged by...

The paper provides an overview of the main statistics produced by the Bank of Italy: financial accounts, monetary statistics, balance of payments, household and business surveys. The volume discusses the problems related to the measurement of economic phenomena, how statistics can be used for...

This paper analyses aggregate household wealth in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, the UK and the US. Building on a new data set for the time span 1980-2011, we discuss the trends in household financial assets in the last thirty years, the reasons for differences across countries,...

Italian Abstract: Il lavoro analizza i risultati dell’Indagine sull’Alfabetizzazione e le Competenze Finanziarie degli Italiani (IACOFI), condotta dalla Banca d’Italia all’inizio del 2020 seguendo la metodologia OCSE-INFE che definisce l’indicatore di competenze finanziarie come la...

Given the importance of banking intermediation, we investigate the determinants of the size of bank loans in 18 OECD countries in the period 1981-1997. The aim of the paper is to show that the ratio of government debt to GDP has a negative effect on the level of bank credit. Second, countries...

In this paper we present new estimates of the effect of households' financial and real wealth on consumption. The analysis makes reference to eleven OECD countries and takes into account quarterly data from 1997 to 2008. Unlike most of the previous literature on European countries, we measure...