We study the effect of the increase in Italian sovereign debt risk on credit supply on a sample of 670,000 bank-firm relationships between December 2010 and December 2011, drawn from the Italian Central Credit Register. To identify a causal link, we exploit the lower impact of sovereign risk on...

The paper explores the view that the Asian currency and financial crises in 1997 and 1998 reflected structural and policy distortions in the countries of the region, even though market overreaction and herding caused the plunge of exchange rates, asset prices and economic activity to be more...

This paper presents stylized facts of the segmentation of the Euro Area (EA) banking system and investigates cross-border banking dynamics. Results show that the determinants of cross-border banking change substantially over-time: (i) in the pre-crisis period of financial integration the...

After August 2007 the plumbing system that supplied banks with wholesale funding, the interbank market, failed because toxic assets obstructed the pipes. Banks were forced to squeeze liquidity in a �lemons market� or to ask for liquidity �on tap� from central banks. This...

We use Italian data on bank lending to firms to study the transmission of shocks affecting bank balance sheets to the volume and cost of credit granted to business borrowers and to the probability of banks accepting loan applications from new borrowers during the 2007-2008 financial crisis. The...

A substantial literature has investigated the role of relationship lending in shielding borrowers from idiosyncratic shocks. Much less is known about how lending relationships and bank-specific characteristics affect the functioning of the credit market in an economy-wide crisis, when banks may...

The aim of the paper is to understand the interaction between market and credit risk. Using a comprehensive set of Italian data, we apply a factor model to identify the common sources of risk driving fluctuations in the real and financial sectors. The common latent factors are then inserted in a...

The availability of new harmonized data on bank interest rates allows a rigorous assessment to be made of cross-country price homogeneity/heterogeneity in euro area retail credit markets. Econometric analysis shows that the banking market is still highly segmented and that the degree of...