The far-reaching regulatory activity in which the financial sector has been involved in recent years has been attracting increased attention to the expected costs and benefits of such regulation; measures undertaken in response to the financial crisis have made these issues even more topical....

In this paper we present an overview of theoretical and empirical contributions exploring the inter-linkages between financial factors and real economic activity. We first revisit the main theoretical approaches that allow financial frictions to be embedded into general equilibrium models, and...

In this paper we present new estimates of the effect of households� financial and real wealth on consumption. The analysis makes reference to eleven OECD countries and takes into account quarterly data from 1997 to 2008. Unlike most of the previous literature on European countries, we...

In this paper we investigate the main features of the Italian financial cycle, extracted by means of a structural trend-cycle decomposition of the credit-to-GDP ratio, using annual observations from 1861 to 2011. In order to draw conclusions based on solid historical data, we provide a thorough...

After a decade of deep transformation, which influenced both lending policies and risk management, Italy�s mutual banks are faced with the upcoming Basel III reform. Economic trends continue to exert pressure on the traditional bank business model. The entry into force of Basel III provides...

In December 2010 the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision published a set of new regulations for banks in response to the financial crisis. This paper aims at evaluating the possible effects of the new framework on banks� available regulatory capital and risk-weighted assets and assessing...

In 2007 the new framework for capital adequacy of banks (Basel 2), defined in 2004 by the Basel Committee for Banking Supervision, will replace the 1988 Accord (Basel 1) in all major countries. In the last years the Committee has carried out several impact studies in order to simulate the...