The literature is unanimous in highlighting that banking crises have a negative impact on GDP, usually more pronounced in developing economies. The magnitude of the losses is more controversial: the quantitative results of studies on the repercussions of banking crises on economic activity, in...

The paper provides a qualitative assessment of the role mainstream economic theory had in orienting Italy's banking legislation from its political unification (1861) to the introduction of the 1936 Banking Act. Five regulatory regimes are considered. Whilst market discipline and self-regulation...

In this paper we conduct a simulation run on a sample of Italian banks where a trigger shock, a one-off event fairly large in size, spreads through the interbank network in a set-up featuring among the actors both commercial banks and the authorities. The banks deleverage to comply with a...

We document the development of the major international banks since the late 1990s, analysing balance-sheet data for 27 large and complex financial institutions. We argue that balance-sheet expansion and business line diversification paved the way for the rise of the universal banking model. This...