The paper examines the current debate on the real effectiveness of delegation in overcoming the problem of time inconsistency that afflicts discretionary monetary policy. An important contribution by Jensen has shown that, when the government is unable to credibly carry out optimal policy and...

This paper assesses the role of relationship lending in explaining simultaneously the innovation activity of Small and Medium Enterprises (SME), their probability to export (i.e. the extensive margin) and their share of exports on total sales conditional on exporting (i.e. the intensive margin)....

The goal of this paper is to investigate the link between the length of a firm-bank relationship and firm's internationalization. The analysis is carried out on matched firm-bank micro-data from a survey of Italian enterprises from 1998 to 2003. We obtain two main results. First, a longer...

This paper assesses the role of relationship lending in explaining simultaneously the innovation activity of Small and Medium Enterprises (SME), their probability to export (i.e. the extensive margin) and their share of exports on total sales conditional on exporting (i.e. the intensive margin)....

This paper investigates SME financing in Italy. The literature distinguishes between two main different lending technologies (LTs) for SMEs: transactional and relationship LTs. We find that banks lend to SMEs by using both LTs together, independently of the size and proximity of borrowers....

Most of the problems that the European Central Bank has encountered are due to the slow progress made in improving the quality of the monetary union. The increasing variance of the inflationary process among the 12 countries, especially at the extremes of income level distribution – between...

Despite the decline during the crisis, Italian households savings rate is in line with major European countries and higher than Us and Uk. Conservative portfolios allowed, during the crisis, to contain volatility and to protect wealth, but they are not an optimal choice for recovery. It is...

SMEs through networks can become more competitive and able to penetrate into foreign markets or emerging economies. A survey on a large sample of SMEs – demonstrating the interest that banks should show for such forms of organization and for new instruments such as the business network...

Using a dataset including more than 6,000 Italian small firms over the period 2010-2012, we find an higher credit growth rate for companies that employ Ict in a more widespread and sophisticated way. This may be related to the improvement of the transparency of small businesses connected with...