This paper studies the effect of credit scoring by banks on bank lending to small businesses by addressing the following questions: does credit scoring increase or decrease the propensity of banks to grant credit? Does it improve the selection of borrowers? Does credit scoring improve or reduce...

By providing liquidity to depositors and credit-line borrowers, banks can be exposed to double-runs on assets and liabilities. For identification, we exploit the 2007 freeze of the European interbank market and the Italian Credit Register. After the shock, there are sizeable, aggregate...

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...

We study the drivers of investment in Italy during the global financial crisis and the sovereign debt crisis. We focus on the effect of leverage while controlling for the role of other drivers: expected demand, profitability, access to credit and uncertainty. As firm-level leverage may be...

We study negative interest rate policy (NIRP) exploiting ECB's NIRP introduction and administrativedata from Italy, severely hit by the Eurozone crisis. NIRP has expansionary effects on credit supply---and hence the real economy---through a portfolio rebalancing channel. NIRP affects banks...

We investigate the impact of information and communication technologies (ICT) on local loan officers' autonomy in small business lending. We derive a simple agency model of the interaction between a local branch manager and the headquarters, which yields an estimable equation for the optimal...

In this paper we use a unique dataset of Italian manufacturing firms that includes firm-level price data to investigate whether increased penetration of Chinese products affects the competitive environment in an advanced country like Italy. Instrumenting import penetration from China to account...