We examine the informational effects of Mamp;As by investigating whether mergers improve banks' abilities to screen their borrowers. By exploiting a dataset in which we observe a measure of a borrower's default risk which the lenders observe only imperfectly, we find evidence of these...

The banking industry is consolidating at an accelerating pace, yet no conclusive results have emerged on the benefits of mergers and acquisitions. We analyze the Italian market, which is similar to other main European countries. By considering both acquisitions (i.e. the purchase of the majority...

In response to fundamental changes in regulation and technology, the financial industry around the world is undergoing an unprecedented wave of consolidation. A growing body of empirical literature has attempted to measure the efficiency gains from Mamp;As; however there is little sense of how...

This paper identifies the macroeconomic factors that influence Italian equity returns and tests the stability of their relation with securities returns. The relation between stock returns and the macroeconomic factors is found to be unstable: Not only are the factor loadings of individual...

The banking industry is consolidating at an accelerating pace, yet no conclusive results have emerged on the benefits of mergers and acquisitions. We analyze the Italian market, which is similar to other main European countries. By considering both acquisitions (i.e. the purchase of the majority...

This paper reconstructs the series of the real returns on Italian equities, bank and Post Office deposits and long-term government bonds from 1860 to today. In the long-run the return on shares was much higher than that on government securities and also that on bank and Post Office deposits....

The general conclusion of the empirical literature is that in-market consolidation generates adverse price changes, harming consumers. Previous studies, however, look only at the short-run pricing impact of consolidation, ignoring effects that take longer to materialize. Using a database that...

The banking industry is consolidating at an accelerating pace, yet no conclusive results have emerged on the benefits of mergers and acquisitions. We analyze the Italian market, which is similar to other main European countries. By considering both acquisitions (i.e. the purchase of the majority...

Using a large database of private firms in Italy, we analyze the determinants of initial public offerings (IPOs) by comparing the ex ante and ex post characteristics of IPOs with those of private firms. The likelihood of an IPO is increasing in the company's size and the industry's...

We estimate the risk-adjusted performance of Italian equity funds, using both net and gross returns (i.e. net returns plus management fees), employing single factor and multi-factor benchmarks. With net returns the funds' performance is not significantly different from zero. With gross returns,...