The topic of financing long-term investment is on the top of the agenda of economic policy makers and it is among the priorities of the Italian Presidency of the European Union. The paper describes the main international initiatives in the field and highlights the three most promising courses of...

The paper describes the characteristics of the market for private placements and discusses the necessary conditions for their uptake in Europe. A private placement is a method of financing used mainly by medium-sized companies which, unable to access the public bond market, turn to one or more...

Using a unique data set, this paper describes the main features of the venture capital industry in Italy. Operations by Italian specialised venture capitalists are only in part devoted to small, young firms from advanced industries, have a rather short duration and are weakly focused on a few...

This paper investigates the determinants of the investment activity of Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) at a macro level, with special emphasis on the possible reaction to a financial crisis in a potential target economy. The analysis relies upon a specially built proprietary database, which...

The paper looks at the characteristics of Italian non-financial firms that accessed the bond market for the first time between 2002 and 2013. The results of logit estimations indicate that first-time bond issuers are significantly larger and more frequently listed on the stock exchange than...

One of the fastest growing areas in empirical finance, and also one of the least rigorously analyzed, especially from a financial econometrics perspective, is the econometric analysis of financial derivatives, which are typically complicated and difficult to analyze. The purpose of this special...

The two recessions that have hit Italy since the end of 2008 have raised the share of non-performing loans to businesses in banks� portfolios substantially. In this paper we evaluate to what extent the deterioration of credit quality was due not only to the decline in firms� sales...

Risk-averse investors take into consideration risk-return tradeoff for decide their new position after the release of relevant information. This paper analyzes the informational content of rating change announcements focusing on the joint reaction they cause on the risk-return binomial. Our...

This study examines the existing relationship between announcements of debt rating changes for companies listed on the Spanish stock exchange and the liquidity of their stocks for the period of 2000 to 2010. Liquidity around the announcement day is analyzed using different liquidity measures...

This study analyzes the effects of six different credit rating announcements on systematic and unsystematic risk in Spanish companies listed on the Electronic Continuous Stock Market from 1988 to 2010. We use an extension of the event study dummy approach that includes direct effects on beta...