Written in celebration of its 350th anniversary in 2018, this book details the history of the central bank of Sweden, Sveriges Riksbank, as presented by Klas Fregert. It relates the bank's history to the development of other major central banks around the world. Chapters are written by some of...

This timely book examines the authorization of Shari’ah-compliant intermediaries as either credit institutions or as investment companies in the European Union.

Analyzing ongoing changes in the design of regulatory and supervisory authorities over the banking and financial industry in Europe, this comprehensive Handbook pays particular attention to the role of national central banks, the new financial supervisory authorities and the European Central...

This paper presents an overview of the results of a research project on monetary transmission pursued by the Eurosystem, which has analyzed micro data on firms and banks in several countries of the euro area in great detail. There is strong empirical support for an interest rate channel working...

We study the impact of financial constraints on firm size distribution (FSD). We find that financially constrained firms, identified using various proxies, are smaller than the others (their FSD is more skewed to the right). However, among OECD countries, the FSD of nonconstrained firms...

The paper notes that the high degree of stickiness of bank lending rates observed in Italy in the past is related to constraints on competition within the banking and financial markets. Using individual data for 63 local Italian banks in a variety of financial environments, it discusses the...

This article discusses the role that macroeconomic uncertainty plays in banks' decisions on the optimal asset allocation. Following the portfolio model proposed by Baum et al. (2005), the article aims at disentangling how Italian banks choose between loans and risk-free assets when uncertainty...

A comprehensive investigation is provided on the issue of the possible cyclical nature of banks' behaviour using a large panel of Italian intermediaries over the period 1985 to 2002. Estimating both static and dynamic models, the article investigates whether loan loss provisions and...