We assess the effects of the sovereign debt crisis on Italian banks� activity using aggregate data on funding and loan rates, lending quantities and income statements for the period 1991-2011. We augment standard reduced-form equations for the variables of interest with the spread on...

We exploit highly disaggregated bank-firm data to investigate the dynamics of foreign vs. domestic credit supply in Italy around the period of the Lehman collapse, which brought a sudden and unexpected deterioration of economic conditions and a sharp increase in credit risk. Taking advantage of...

We examine the implications of the sovereign debt tensions on the Italian credit market by estimating the effect of the 10-year BTP-Bund spread on a wide array of bank interest rates, categories of loans and income statement variables. We exploit the heterogeneity between large and small...

Credit registers collect, store and share information regarding borrowers� past and current credit relations. Interestingly, such data is typically erased from the public records after a number of years, in accordance with privacy protection laws, which aim at providing individuals with a...

Nunn (2008) found a negative relationship between past slave exports and economic performance within Africa. Here we investigate these findings and the suggested causal pathway in further detail. Extending the sample period back in time we reveal that the coefficient on slave exports did not...

This paper investigates how bank profitability is affected by corporate income tax (CIT) using aggregate data on the banking sector of the main industrialized countries for the period 1981-2003. Two main novelties emerge with respect to the existing literature. First, the paper explicitly...

Asymmetric information in securitization deals is analyzed based on a unique dataset comprising a million mortgages, both securitized and not, and using a methodology, previously applied to insurance data, that looks at the correlation between risk transfer and default probability. The main...

Corporate finance theories suggest that problems of asymmetric information and moral hazard in credit markets can be addressed by choosing short-term maturities. Theories of debt renegotiation suggest that the credibility of the implicit commitment to not make concessions to insolvent borrowers,...

An important element of the macro-prudential analysis is the study of the link between business cycle fluctuations and banking sector profitability and how this link is affected by institutional and structural characteristics. This work estimates a set of equations for net interest income,...