Are the drivers of domestic and cross-border M&As in the banking sector different? Despite the intense research on bank M&As in the last decade, the attention paid to this issue is surprisingly limited. We fill this gap studying the ex-ante determinants of national and international acquisitions...

This paper investigates what factors might help explain the internationalization strategy of banks and insurance companies, by comparing the determinants of cross-border M&As in the two sectors in a unified framework. The empirical analysis shows that between 1990 and 2003 the...

This paper presents some new evidence on the conflict of interest that may arise when banks underwrite corporate securities and sell them to their customers. Two alternative views are confronted; a) that commercial banks possess private information on the financial condition of their clients and...

Guarantees play an important role in debt contracts. They alter the risk for the lender, transform borrowers' incentives and, possibly, modify the equilibrium allocation of financial resources. This paper studies the role of guarantees on bank loans, using a sample of over 50,000 individual...

I present an endogenous growth model that studies the effects of local inter-industry and intra-industry knowledge spillovers in R&D on the allocation of economic activities between two regions. The equilibrium is the result of a tension between a centripetal force, the cost of transporting...

Using a representative panel of manufacturing firms, we estimate the response of job and hours worked to currency swings, showing that it depends primarily on the firm's exposure to foreign sales and its reliance on imported inputs. Further, we show that, for given international orientation, the...

This paper estimates the determinants of households’ choice between fixed rate (FRM) and adjustable rate mortgage (ARM) contracts, using the Bank of Italy’s Survey of Household Income and Wealth. Contrary to the predictions of the theoretical literature, the analysis shows that most...

This paper provides a direct test of banks' ability to mitigate informational asymmetries. In syndicated loans, lenders' incentive to screen ex ante and monitor ex post borrowers increases with the share they retain; consequently, the higher this share, the less risky the loan is considered by...

Multinational banks are a distinctive feature of today’s globalized economy with some institutions now operating in more than 100 countries. Despite the thorough analyses of bank internationalization over the last decades, the literature has failed to provide clear evidence that...