The goal of this paper is to investigate the link between the length of a firm-bank relationship and firm's internationalization. The analysis is carried out on matched firm-bank micro-data from a survey of Italian enterprises from 1998 to 2003. We obtain two main results. First, a longer...

Why do some countries suffer from backward financial institutions and weak corporate governance rules? We show that, even if, overall, the economy would benefit corporate governance reforms, not all the agents would stand to gain from the improvement. In particular, entrepreneurs and firms that...

Many empirical analyses find that the performance of firms headed by women (female firms) varies with respect to those headed by men and that the greatest part of this gap is due to observable characteristics (i.e. gender) related to firms� characteristics. In this paper we evaluate whether...

This paper investigates which factors determine a bank's decision to expand its activities abroad and what determines its choice of the countries to invest in. The empirical analysis is conducted using firm-level data on foreign subsidiaries for a representative sample fo nearly 2,500 OECD banks.