Payments and financial market infrastructures are vital components of modern economies, yet they have often been overlooked by economists. However, any economic exchange, including financial market transactions, is matched by a payment leg, and the safety, efficiency, and immediacy of the...

This open access book gives a concise introduction to the practical implementation of monetary policy by modern central banks. It describes the conventional instruments used in advanced economies and the unconventional instruments that have been widely adopted since the financial crisis of...

This open access book gives a concise introduction to the practical implementation of monetary policy by modern central banks. It describes the conventional instruments used in advanced economies and the unconventional instruments that have been widely adopted since the financial crisis of...

type="main" xml:lang="en" <p>This paper identifies the macroeconomic factors that influence Italian equity returns and tests the stability of their relation with securities returns. The relation between stock returns and the macroeconomic factors is found to be unstable: not only are the factor...</p>

We examine the informational effects of M&As by investigating whether bank mergers improve banks’ ability to screen borrowers. By exploiting a dataset in which we observe a measure of a borrower’s default risk that the lenders observe only imperfectly, we find evidence of these informational...