The outbreak of the financial crisis coincided with a sharp increase of worldwide interbank interest rates. We analyze the micro and macroeconomic determinants of this phenomenon, finding that before August 2007 interbank rates were insensitive to borrower characteristics, whereas afterwards...

The paper analyzes the evolution of competitive conditions in the Italian banking industry using firm-level balance sheet data for the period 1983-1997. Regulatory reform, large-scale consolidation, and competitive pressure from other European countries have changed substantially the banking...

The paper presents a simple theory of intraday behavior in the interbank market.

In this paper we test for the potential bias in the estimated contribution of a supply restriction on lending to enterprises, as captured by the assessment of credit standards provided by the banks participating in the Eurosystem Bank Lending Survey (BLS banks). For Italy, we combine the...

This paper deals with the usefulness of several measures of financial spreads (the slope of the yield curve, the reverse yield gap, the credit quality spread) for fore-casting real economic activity and inflation in the euro area. A quarterly Bayesian vector autoregression model is used to...

This paper studies the transmission of monetary policy shocks from the US to the euro-area using a two-country structural VAR with no exogeneity assumption. The analysis reveals the following results. First, in response to an unexpected increase in the Federal funds rate, the euro immediately...

The prominent role assigned to money by the ECB has been the subject of an intense debate because of the declining predictive power of the monetary aggregate M3 for inflation in recent years. This paper reassesses the information content of monetary analysis for future inflation using dynamic...