Insufficient competition remains a major obstacle to growth in Italy. The main culprits include the institutional environment and the regulations governing some economic sectors subject to market failures. As to the former, relative neglect of economic efficiency has produced an unstable and...

Exploiting the timing of the 2005-2006 Italian bankruptcy law reforms, we disentangle the effects of reorganization and liquidation in bankruptcy on bank financing nd firm investment. A 2005 reform introduces reorganization procedures facilitating loan renegotiation. The 2006 reform subsequently...

Many theories study how firms'cost of funding depends on reorganization and liquidation in bankruptcy. However empirical evidence on this subject is scarce due to the difficulty in interpreting reforms that change different legal instruments at the same time. We take advantage of the timing of...

Every year 400,000 entrepreneurs fail and 60,000 file for personal bankruptcy. The option to declare bankruptcy provides entrepreneurs with insurance against the financial consequences of business failures. However, it comes at the cost of worsened credit market conditions. In this paper, we...

We study the effect of the increase in Italian sovereign debt risk on credit supply on a sample of 670,000 bank-firm relationships between December 2010 and December 2011, drawn from the Italian Central Credit Register. To identify a causal link, we exploit the lower impact of sovereign risk on...

This paper studies what impact liquidity shocks have on liquid assets and domestic and cross-border lending. In particular, we look for differences across banks depending on their international exposure and we account for the effects of the sovereign debt crisis and the ECB's non-conventional...

This paper shows evidence on the real effects of the bank lending channel exploiting the dramatic 2007 liquidity drought in interbank markets as a source of variation in banks' credit supply. For a large sample of Italian firms we combine information on firm-bank credit relationships, firms and...

This work investigates both theoretically and empirically how the behaviour of financial analysts is affected by competition, measured as the strength of coverage of a stock from other analysts. The interaction among analysts and investors is modelled as a dynamic cheap talk game. The...

This paper sheds new light on the value of relationship lending by studying whether, after Lehman's default, banks provided a steadier flow of credit and charged lower interest rates, to those firms they established a closer relation with. By exploiting the presence of multiple banking...

This paper investigates whether competition affects the degree of optimism in recommendations on Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) issued by affiliated sell-side analysts. Competition is measured by the number of unaffiliated analysts covering the IPO. Since the measure of competition is likely to...