The paper provides a qualitative assessment of the role mainstream economic theory had in orienting Italy's banking legislation from its political unification (1861) to the introduction of the 1936 Banking Act. Five regulatory regimes are considered. Whilst market discipline and self-regulation...

The focus of the present volume - which originates from a workshop held at the Bank of Italy on 16 and 17 April 2009 - is the regulatory response given to financial crises in the past, across countries. Alongside the scholarly interest of such a review its aim is also to offer some insights that...

In a bank-oriented country such as Italy, bank credit is by far the most important source of external finance for firms. The allocative efficiency of banks is therefore an important element underlying the overall performance of the economy. In this paper we focus on allocation across industrial...

This paper offers the first quantitative assessment of labour productivity dynamics within Italy's industrial sector over the period 1911-1951 and of their links with competition policy. By relying on a newly compiled dataset and on fresh labour productivity estimates, we find that the earlier...

Since the mid-2000s standard price-competitiveness indicators for some European countries have been providing conflicting signals, particularly in Italy. Against a broad stability of the producer price (PPI)-based measure, the manufacturing unit labour cost (ULCM)-deflated indicator points to a...

The aim of the present note is to outline a general, but at the same time comprehensive, framework of the array of instruments that regulators can use in their activity of prudential regulation and supervision. Such a framework should be applicable to a variety of geographical and historical...

Italy's economic growth over its 150 years of unified history did not occur at a steady pace nor was it balanced across sectors. Relying on an entirely new input (labour and capital) database by us built and presented in the Appendix, together with new Banca d'Italia estimates of GDP by sector,...

Paolo Baffi was an intellectual deeply absorbed by the problems of his time: the great depression, the war, reconstruction, monetary stability. He took care of these problems by acquiring both theoretical tools and a thorough knowledge of statistics.With a key role in the Bank of Italy’s...

This paper presents the first quantitative assessment of labour productivity dynamics in Italy's industrial sector between 1911 and 1951 and explores their links with changes in competition policy. It relies on a newly compiled dataset and provides fresh labour productivity estimates,...