The paper studies the motivations behind banks’ shareholding of non-financial firms using a panel of large Italian companies in the period 1994-2000. Empirical evidence shows that banks are shareholders of companies that are less profitable, have experienced slower growth, are more indebted...

This paper addresses the "rate of return" puzzle of monetary theory. Similarly to the legal restrictions theory of the demand for money, we assume that Government bonds are subject to a minimum purchase requirement. Differently from this theory, however, we assume that intermediaries, when...

In this paper, we focus on the determinants of the relationship between aid and corruption. We propose a static principal-agent model where a donor faces the problem of giving aid to a recipient country in which the phenomenon of corruption is widely spread. We distinguish among two different...

The paper investigates the reaction of the Federal Reserve to developments in the stock market. The issue is analyzed by first constructing an Index of Stock Price Misalignement in which the fundamental value of the stocks is computed on the basis of the discounted cash flow approach and by then...

We consider a simple overlapping generations economy where the behavior of intermediaries, in a market characterized by asymmetric information and moral hazard, may give rise to cyclical equilibria. When capital increases output and savings also increase and therefore more capital will be...

Changes in formal and informal central bank independence (CBI) in France, Italy and the UK in the period from the mid-1970s to the 1990s are examined; the major changes occurred in the 1990s, after the disinflations of the 1980s. Broad trends in the informal independence of central banks, defined...

We analyze the classical asset pricing model assuming non fully rational agents. Agents forecast future prices cum dividend through an adaptive learning rule. This assumption provides an explanation of some anomalies encountered in the empirical analysis of asset prices under full rationality:...

This paper analyzes the Italian segment of the Eurozone money market since the start of the European Monetary Union. Some relevant variables are analyzed at different frequencies (intramonth, intraweek and intraday): both level and volatility of the overnight interest rate, volume exchanged in...