Many authors underlined the convergence of financial structures towards a model which combines elements of the Anglo Saxon one, where markets prevail, with characteristics of the continental European systems, where intermediaries are predominant. The goal of this paper is to study financial...

The origins of financial accounts in the United States and Italy: Copeland, Baffi and the institutions -- Private sector debt matters too: theoretical perspectives on credit and the building of financial accounts -- Household wealth in a cross-country perspective -- Should household wealth and...

In this paper, we investigate the main features of the Italian financial cycle, extracted by means of a structural trend-cycle decomposition of the credit-to-GDP ratio, using annual observations from 1861 to 2011. In order to draw conclusions based on solid historical data, we provide a thorough...