The paper examines the view that the Asian currency and financial crisis in 1997 and 1998 reflected structural and policy distortions in the countries of the region, even though market overreaction and herding caused the plunge of exchange rates, asset prices and economic activity to be more...

We look at business survey data on Italian internationalized firms’ characteristics and performances since the outbreak of the 2008 crisis until 2012. Among Italian firms with 20 employees or more, an increasing share (from 7.1 to 13.2% between 2006 and 2011) owns a foreign productive unit....

After August 2007 the plumbing system that supplied banks with wholesale funding, the interbank market, failed because toxic assets obstructed the pipes. Banks were forced to squeeze liquidity in a �lemons market� or to ask for liquidity �on tap� from central banks. This...

In this paper, after discussing the theoretical underpinnings of unconventional monetary policy measures, we review the existing empirical evidence on their effectiveness, focusing on those adopted by the European Central Bank and by the Federal Reserve. These measures operate in two ways:...

We use Italian data on bank lending to firms to study the transmission of shocks affecting bank balance sheets to the volume and cost of credit granted to business borrowers and to the probability of banks accepting loan applications from new borrowers during the 2007-2008 financial crisis. The...

A substantial literature has investigated the role of relationship lending in shielding borrowers from idiosyncratic shocks. Much less is known about how lending relationships and bank-specific characteristics affect the functioning of the credit market in an economy-wide crisis, when banks may...