This paper investigates whether local cooperative banks mitigated income inequality in Italian municipalities after the two main crises that characterized the European landscape between 2008 and 2015, i.e. the financial and sovereign-debt crises. Estimation results reveal that, although in the...

Using rich data from the Italian local credit markets (provinces), this paper investigates the impact of local banking development on income inequality and the role of the socioeconomic structure in this link. Exploiting the Italian historical banking regulation to instrument for the local...

This paper investigates the firm-main bank relationship in a sample of Italy's SMEs. The findings suggest that banks lend to SMEs via different lending technologies. These results support the hardening-of-soft-information view, whereby also transactional lenders might somehow use difficult to...

A salient feature of the Italian economy is its high reliance on small firms and local productive systems. For this reason, a relevant policy question is how the Italian production system can deal with the growing competition in global markets. The literature suggests that Italian economic...

In this paper, we propose a measure of the risk appetite of a bank's ownership structure and investigate whether ownership risk propensity is correlated with performance and default risk. Our indicator, the Risk-Weighted Ownership (RWO), assumes that credit risk is a proxy for the risk appetite...

Using a large database built from the credit files of UniCredit we focus on loans to small businesses at the peak of the crisis. We study the determinants of the worsening of financial tension up to March 2009 for those customers experiencing (or close to) financial tension already at the end of...