The paper analyses Islamic finance from the central bank and supervisory authority�s perspective, focusing on the European and Italian context. It depicts a rapidly expanding sector, with recent annual growth rates of between 10 and 15 percent and a geographical presence that now reaches...

The banking industry is consolidating at an accelerating pace, yet not conclusive results have emerged on the benefits of mergers and acquisitions. We analyze the Italian market, which is similar to other main European countries.

Interbank markets allow banks to cope with specific liquidity shocks. At the same time, they may be a channel allowing a bank default to spread to other banks. This paper analyzes how contagion propagates within the Italian interbank market using a unique data set including actual bilateral...

The paper offers theoretical and empirical insights into the links between banks and firms in industrial districts and to the way investment is financed. Theoretically, it is assumed that district-banking localism is embedded in the industrial districts� social context. District banks...

This paper investigates how bank profitability is affected by corporate income tax (CIT) using aggregate data on the banking sector of the main industrialized countries for the period 1981-2003. Two main novelties emerge with respect to the existing literature. First, the paper explicitly...

Using Bank of Italy data on Italian banks in the period 1990-2004, the paper analyses the short and long-run effects of the concentration of the banking industry on the availability of credit to small and medium-sized firms. Our study employs a bank-based approach and investigates the...

This paper analyzes the effect of information technologies (IT) in the financial sector using micro-data on a panel of over 600 Italian banks over the period 1989-2000. We estimate stochastic cost and profit functions allowing for individual banks� displacements from the efficient frontier...

TThis paper investigates which factors determine a bank's decision to expand its activities abroad and what determines its choice of the countries to invest in. The empirical analysis is conducted using firm-level data on foreign subsidiaries for a representative sample of nearly 2,500 OECD...

High concentration of creditors can have two beneficial effects on borrowers: i) by enhancing lenders� ability to monitor, it can reduce the likelihood of financial distress; ii) by reducing coordination failure among creditors, it can help a distressed firm to avoid bankruptcy. However, a...

The revised Basel Capital Accord requires banks to meet a capital requirement for operational risk as part of an overall risk-based capital framework. Three distinct options for calculating operational risk charges are proposed (Basic Approach, Standardised Approach, Advanced Measurement...