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...

Standard risk metrics tend to underestimate the true risks of hedge funds because of serial correlation in the reported returns. Getmansky, Lo, and Makarov(2004) derive mean, variance, Sharpe ratio, and beta formulae adjusted for serial correlation. Following their lead, we derive adjusted...

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...

Using a clustering procedure,we classify Italian funds ex-post on the basis of the composition of their portfolios and find that the optimal number of clusters is equal to 4. The four groups which result from the statistical classification closely match the 4-level aggregation of the 20 ex-ante...

This paper explores the implications of systemic risk in Credit Structured Finance (CSF). Risk measurement issues loomed large during the 2007-08 financial crisis, as the massive, unprecedented number of downgrades of AAA senior bond tranches inflicted severe losses on banks, calling into...

In a bank-oriented country such as Italy, bank credit is by far the most important source of external finance for firms. The allocative efficiency of banks is therefore an important element underlying the overall performance of the economy. In this paper we focus on allocation across industrial...

We analyse the wide array of rescue programmes adopted in several countries, following Lehman Brothers� default in September 2008, in order to support banks and other financial institutions. We first provide an overview of the programmes, comparing their characteristics, magnitudes and...

This paper depicts � from a variety of viewpoints � the degree of indebtedness and potential financial vulnerabilities of households across the Italian regions. Micro-data from several sources suggest that the financial situation of Italian households shows striking differences at...

In the 2008-09 school year the Bank of Italy and the Italian Ministry of Education started an experimental program to incorporate financial education into school curricula. This paper describes the experience since then. According to the program, teachers receive training from the Bank on...

We build a microsimulation model to monitor the financial vulnerability of Italian households. Starting from household-level data from the Survey on Household Income and Wealth and matching them with macroeconomic forecasts on debt and income, we project the future path of households’...