What are the effects of local credit institutions on the distribution of income? Why should local banking development matter for the level of inequality? We focus on how different dimensions of banking development and other characteristics of 103 provinces in Italy affect the level of...

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...