We study the mobility of Italian firms across different lending banks in the aftermath of Lehman Brothers' collapse, when 40 per cent of the firms analysed changed their pool of lending banks. Using a unique dataset on a sample of about 3,000 Italian firms that encompasses financial and economic...

We find evidence of a bank lending channel for the euro area operating via bank risk. Financial innovation and the new ways to transfer credit risk have tended to diminish the informational content of standard bank balance-sheet indicators. We show that bank risk conditions, as perceived by...