The paper investigates the relationship between the underground economy and financial deepening. Entrepreneurs can only access external finance by disclosing credible information in formal documentation. This may be impossible for many informal producers, who lack proper accounting records....

In this paper, we test whether micro firms run by migrants pay more for credit than firms run by natives and whether the differences in the cost of credit for these two groups of entrepreneurs decrease as the informational and cultural gaps narrow. We employ a large and unique data set providing...

We assess the effects of the sovereign debt crisis on Italian banks� activity using aggregate data on funding and loan rates, lending quantities and income statements for the period 1991-2011. We augment standard reduced-form equations for the variables of interest with the spread on...