Prior empirical research on the relation between credit risk and the business cycle has failed to properly investigate the presence of asymmetric effects. To fill this gap, we examine this relation both at the aggregate and the bank level exploiting a unique dataset on Italian banks' borrowers'...

In the recent banking literature on the relationship between credit risk and the business cycle, the presence of asymmetric effects both across credit risk regimes and through the business cycle has been generally neglected. Employing threshold regression models both at the aggregate and the...

In this paper we describe the methodologies that can be used for stress testing credit risk providing some applications to the Italian banking system.Within the FSAP for Italy, stress tests examined the impact of a variety of shocks on the nine major Italian banking groups. The tests were...

In this paper we describe the methodologies that can be used for stress testing credit risk providing some applications to the Italian banking system.Within the FSAP for Italy, stress tests examined the impact of a variety of shocks on the nine major Italian banking groups. The tests were...

This paper discusses the role that macroeconomic uncertainty plays in banks’ choices regarding the optimal asset allocation. Following the portfolio model proposed by Baum et al. (2005), the paper aims at disentangling how Italian banks choose between loans and risk-free assets when the...

Supervisors and policy makers pay increasing attention to the possible procyclical nature of banks’ behaviour. Indeed, to guarantee macro and financial stability, it is important to understand if, and to what extent, banks are affected by the macroeconomy and if there are second round effects....

There is an increasing debate on the potential use of the signals arising from financial markets as a complement to the information set available to supervisors. Following this stream of research, this paper provides for the first time some empirical evidence on Italian banks, using a unique...

We suggest the use of an index of Internet job-search intensity (the Google Index, GI) as the best leading indicator to predict the US monthly unemployment rate. We perform a deep out-of-sample forecasting comparison analyzing many models that adopt our preferred leading indicator (GI), the more...

We investigate the duration of bad loans for a unique data set of sole proprietorships in Italy, finding that bad loans for female firms last longer. However, this result is mainly due to the fact that loans granted to female firms are less frequently written off than those to male ones,...