In the recent banking literature on the relationship between credit risk and the business cycle, the presence of asymmetric effects both across credit risk regimes and through the business cycle has been generally neglected. Employing threshold regression models both at the aggregate and the...

This paper discusses the role that macroeconomic uncertainty plays in banks’ choices regarding the optimal asset allocation. Following the portfolio model proposed by Baum et al. (2005), the paper aims at disentangling how Italian banks choose between loans and risk-free assets when the...

Supervisors and policy makers pay increasing attention to the possible procyclical nature of banks’ behaviour. Indeed, to guarantee macro and financial stability, it is important to understand if, and to what extent, banks are affected by the macroeconomy and if there are second round effects....

There is an increasing debate on the potential use of the signals arising from financial markets as a complement to the information set available to supervisors. Following this stream of research, this paper provides for the first time some empirical evidence on Italian banks, using a unique...