This paper investigates whether local cooperative banks mitigated income inequality in Italian municipalities after the two main crises that characterized the European landscape between 2008 and 2015, i.e. the financial and sovereign-debt crises. Estimation results reveal that, although in the...

This paper investigates the interplay between financial frictions, organizational innovation and managerial restructuring among Italian small and medium-sized enterprises during the Great Financial Crisis. Using firm-level data from the VIII UniCredit survey, we find that financial constraints...

Equity release schemes (ERS) may provide pension insurance by liquidating owner-occupied residential property. This paper examines the available data on market conditions for such products in all EU member states to cluster countries. Need for ERS is measured by demographic pressure, risk of...

This paper tests the impact of an imperfect bank-firm type match on firms' financial constraints using a dataset of about 4,500 Italian manufacturing firms. We start considering an optimal matching of opaque (transparent) borrowing firms with relational (transactional) lending main banks. Next...

This paper tests the impact of family ownership on firms' export decisions using a rich data set of about 20,000 Italian manufacturers. The results reveal that family ownership increases the probability that firms export, although the effect weakens as ownership concentration rises. The benefit...