The consolidation process that characterized the banking industry in the last decades has been widely analyzed, but very few studies have investigated what are the reasons why a number of announced deals were not concluded. We fill this gap in the literature analyzing the characteristics of...

What drives bankers to create larger and larger, often multinational banking groups? In this paper we investigate whether the targets in cross-border bank M&As are materially different from those banks targeted in domestic M&A deals. The main message of this paper is that, with few exceptions,...

The recent financial crisis has clearly shown that the relationship between bank internationalization and risk is complex. Multinational banks can benefit from portfolio diversification, reducing their overall riskiness, but this effect can be offset by incentives going in the opposite...

We estimate the effect of exchange rate movements on ï¬rm-level wages, using a representative panel of manufacturing ï¬rms. We show that the direction and size of wage adjustment is shaped by the international exposure of each ï¬rm on both the sale and cost side of the balance sheet,...

The recent process of globalization has been characterized by a rapid increase of foreign direct investments (FDIs), outpacing the simultaneous expansion of arms-length trade (exporting). Trade theory traces back different patterns of internationalization to differences in productivity levels...

The paper compares the essential features of the Italian banking system with those of the other large euro-area countries. The analysis focuses on banks? size, ownership and competitiveness, their role in financing firms, the composition of their balance sheets and their degree of...

Trade theory traces back different patterns of internationalization to heterogeneity between firms, measured both through differences in productivity levels and size. In this paper we analyze the link between heterogeneity within sectors and internationalization choices, namely trade and foreign...

We study the performance of the so called Made in Italy agri-food exports over the last fifteen years, merging the strand of analysis that estimated price and demand elasticities with that considering more explicitly the role of product quality. We proceed in three steps. First, we estimate the...

Are the drivers of domestic and cross-border M&As in the banking sector different? We answer this question studying the <italic>ex ante</italic> determinants of national and international acquisitions in the banking sector in an unbalanced panel of nearly 1000 banks from 50 countries, from 1992 to 2007. Contrary...