This paper investigates the existence of cross-sectional differences in the response of lending to monetary policy and GDP shocks owing to a different degree of bank capitalization. The effects on lending of shocks to bank capital that are caused by a specific (higher than 8 per cent) solvency...

Regulation requires banks to hold a minimum capital endowment upon their establishment. But what role does initial capital play in a bank�s lifecycle? This paper addresses the issue for start-up banks. We use both survival-time and binary choice models for a sample of newly-established...

This paper analyzes the effects of the financial crisis on credit supply by using highly detailed data on bank-firm relationships in Italy after Lehman’s collapse. We control for firms’ unobservable characteristics, such as credit demand and borrowers’ risk, by exploiting multiple lending....

I show how cyclical aggregate shocks can stimulate structural reallocation activities, which in turn amplify the effect of the shock. I emphasize the informational aspects related to restructuring activities and their potential interplay with aggregate shocks. Building on work by Caplin and...

This paper analyses the business cycle properties of 183 time series relevant to the Italian economy, including real, monetary and international variables. We propose new monthly coincident and leading composite indicators for the Italian business cycle; the leading indicator anticipates the...

We study how aggregate volatility is influenced by the propagation of idiosyncratic shocks across firms through the network of ownership relations. We use detailed data on cross-holdings as well as the relevant balance sheet information for almost the entire universe of Italian limited liability...

In an economy where entrepreneurs with unequal "abilities" face alternative investment projects, which differ in degree of risk and productivity, we analyse the Nash equilibrium contracts arising from a banks-borrowers game in the context of asymmetric information. We show that, for a particular...

This paper investigates the markup of price over marginal cost in Italian manufacturing branches. The approach used is an extension of Hall's model that addresses some measurement shortcomings and theoretical limitations that may affect this class of model.

The paper studies the transmission of monetary policy shocks in Italy, by means of a structural VAR, using a long data sample; focusing on a long sample period permits a comparison between the Italian evidence and the international literature and makes it possible to test the robustness of the...