The paper analyzes the role of guarantees on loan interest rates before and during the recent financial crisis in Italian firm financing. The paper improves on existing literature by distinguishing between real and personal guarantees. Further, the paper investigates the potential different role...

This paper aims at shedding light on the influence of guarantees on the loan pricing. After reviewing the literature on the role of guarantees in bank lending decisions, we estimate a bank interest rate model that explicitly includes collateral and personal guarantees as explanatory variables....

The paper analyzes the role of guarantees on loan interest rates before and during the recent financial crisis in Italian firm financing. The paper improves on existing literature by distinguishing between real and personal guarantees. Further, the paper investigates the potential different role...

This paper reports tests of hypotheses that a variety of interest rates and other measures from financial markets in countries belonging to the European Monetary Union (EMU) were converging prior to the introduction of the euro in January 1999. We expected to find convergence because of i)...

This paper aims at analysing whether banking changes that occurred in Italy in the last fifteen years have mined the soundness of its financial system. We look for potential threats to financial stability as a result of the dynamic behaviour of Italian banks that progressively have been...

This paper aims at analyzing the impact of Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) on frms' investment policies in the presence of financial imperfections. Our results show that investment is positively correlated to measures of internal funds available to firms and negatively to the level of...

This paper analyses how financial and labor market imperfections jointly influence investment. The contemporaneous presence of imperfections in both markets gives rise to a negative correlation between EPL and investment: firms facing negative shocks see their financial constraints worsen in...