The recent financial crisis has induced firms to turn increasingly to financing sources other than bank credit, and banks to boost their income from non-lending services. This paper provides some evidence concerning possibility and convenience for Italian banks to expand the supply of financial...

FinTech credit has attracted significant attention from academics and policymakers in recent years. Given its growing importance, in this paper we provide an overview of the empirical research on FinTech credit to households and non-financial corporations (NFCs). We focus on three broad topics:...

Using a unique data set, this paper describes the main features of the venture capital industry in Italy. Operations by Italian specialised venture capitalists are only in part devoted to small, young firms from advanced industries, have a rather short duration and are weakly focused on a few...

We use an extensive loan-level dataset to study the influence of non-performing loans (NPLs) on the supply of bank credit to non-financial firms in Italy between 2008 and 2015. We use time-varying firm fixed effects to control for shifts in demand and changes in borrower characteristics, and we...

In this paper we test for the potential bias in the estimated contribution of a supply restriction on lending to enterprises, as captured by the assessment of credit standards provided by the banks participating in the Eurosystem Bank Lending Survey (BLS banks). For Italy, we combine the...

During the financial crisis banks faced liquidity shocks, and lending slowed down. The reduction in credit availability was due to demand- and supply-side factors. The decrease in turnover and investment led to a contraction of financial needs; on the other hand, the tightening of credit supply...