After the 2008 Financial Meltdown the need to reconsider the separation between commercial banking and other financial risky activities - ring fencing - in order to mitigate systemic risks and to address the too big to fail problems was publicly recognized both in the United States and in...

Using data at the bank‐firm level for a large sample of small firms collected through the 8th UniCredit Survey conducted in 2011, we investigate the extent to which banks of different size reward more innovative firms, in terms of both access to lending and volume of credit granted. First we...

We investigate the effect of kinship between borrowers and cosigners on repayment performance in microcredit, by using data coming from a leading Italian microfinance provider for the period 2009-2012. Estimates on a pool of 2,350 loans show that the presence of closely related cosigners tends...