Following the sovereign debt crisis, bank interest rates charged to non-financial firms declined sharply in the euro area. This work explores the firms' balance-sheet channel hypothesis on the role played by firms' characteristics and risk profile in the transmission of monetary policy. Using a...

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...

We analyse the wide array of rescue programmes adopted in several countries, following Lehman Brothers' default in September 2008, in order to support banks and other financial institutions. We first provide an overview of the programmes, comparing their characteristics, magnitudes and...

This paper analyzes firms' difficulties in accessing credit before and during the crisis, by focusing on two of their characteristics: financial fragility and growth prospects. Our econometric analysis indicates that fragile financial conditions were associated with a much higher than average...

This paper studies what impact liquidity shocks have on liquid assets and domestic and cross-border lending. In particular, we look for differences across banks depending on their international exposure and we account for the effects of the sovereign debt crisis and the ECB's non-conventional...

This paper tests the role of different banks' liquidity funding structures in explaining the bank failures that occurred in the United States between 2007 and 2009. The results highlight that funding is indeed a significant factor in explaining banks' probability of default. By confirming the...

Extreme value theory is concerned with the study of the asymptotical distribution of extreme events, that is to say events which are rare in frequency and huge with respect to the majority of observations. Statistical methods derived from this theory have been increasingly employed in finance,...

In 2007 the new framework for capital adequacy of banks (Basel 2), defined in 2004 by the Basel Committee for Banking Supervision, will replace the 1988 Accord (Basel 1) in all major countries. In the last years the Committee has carried out several impact studies in order to simulate the...

This paper develops a methodology for identifying systemically important financial institutions based on that developed by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (2011) and used by the Financial Stability Board in its yearly G-SIBs identification. The methodology uses publicly available data...

This paper studies the effect of bank lending shocks on aggregate labor productivity. Exploiting a unique administrative dataset covering the universe of Italian manufacturing firms between 2000 and 2015, we apply the Melitz and Polanec (2015) decomposition at the 4-digit industry level to...