A growing number of studies on the US subprime market indicate that, due to asymmetric information, credit risk transfer activities have perverse effects on banks� lending standards. We investigate a large part of the market for securitized assets (�prime mortgages�) in Italy, a...

We study firms� incentives to acquire costly information in booms and recessions to understand the role of endogenous information in explaining business cycles. We find that when the economy has been in a recession in the previous period, and firms enter the current period with a...

The information content of stock prices is analysed without imposing strong restrictions on traders' preferences and the distribution of dividends. Noise in the information contained in equilibrium prices arises from endogenous asset supply, which offsets price movements due to informed trading....

We examine the informational effects of M&As by investigating whether bank mergers improve banks� ability to screen borrowers. By exploiting a dataset in which we observe a measure of a borrower�s default risk that the lenders observe only imperfectly, we find evidence of these...

We investigate the effects of competition in the banking sector on the creation of firms in the non-financial sector, explicitly allowing for heterogeneous effects across borrowers characterized by different degrees of asymmetric information. We find evidence of a bellshaped relationship between...

Linguistic and cultural differences, different legal and supervisory frameworks, relationship lending have been repeatedly mentioned as barriers to European retail banking integration. We investigate whether these barriers have affected integration within national boundaries, using an index of...

Is deregulation sufficient to grant free entry in local credit markets? Economic theory suggests at least two ways in which asymmetric information between incumbents and entrants can work as an endogenous barrier to entry. First, entrants� pool of applicants contains a larger share of...