One of the most lively-debated effects of banking acquisitions is the change in lending and asset allocation of the target bank in favour of transaction-based products, at the expense of small and informationally opaque borrowers. These changes may be the result of two distinct restructuring...

In this comprehensive original reference work, the editors have brought together an unrivalled group of distinguished scholars and practitioners to comment on the historical and contemporary role of industrial districts (IDs).

Bank deregulation and progress in information technology altered the geographical diffusion of banking structures and instruments, and reduced operational distance between banks and local economies. Although, the consolidation of the banking industry promoted the geographical concentration of...

In the early 1990s, a widely shared opinion among scholars and practitioners was that the importance of physical proximity between banks and borrowers would be doomed to decrease drastically over time and, put in extreme terms, the end of banking geography would become a real possibility....

This paper reports results from a study of location, ownership, and acquisitions of automated teller machines (ATMs) by a sample of large Italian banks between 1991 and 1995. The sample banks had 85% of Italian banking assets. Data are collected at the provincial level for each bank. The...

This paper studies the dynamic and stochastic properties of fixed investments (IL) for five Italian sectors and for the period 1930-1991. Moreover, it analyses the relationship between the trend and cyclical innovations of IL and between these two types of innovations with those of GDP, real...

This article analyses the role of guarantees on loan interest rates of Italian firms before and during the recent financial crisis. It improves on the existing literature by using explicit measure of collateral and personal guarantees and by modelling unobserved heterogeneity between low-level...

This paper aims at analyzing the impact of Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) on firms' investment policies in the contemporaneous presence of financial imperfections. Our results show that investment is significantly affected by the presence of both market imperfections; they are robust to...