The unsatisfactory performance of Italian export volumes in the last decade has been attributed to three factors; the product specialization still centered around traditional sectors, the small firm size and the exceptional rise in export unit values. This paper analyzes the latter with the aim...

Even before the global crisis, the Italian economy was in difficulties internationally, but slow growth and a declining share of world trade were accompanied by a perceptible process of manufacturing transformation. This paper, using data from the Bank of Italy�s survey of manufacturers,...

A remarkable feature of short-term business finance is the widespread use of trade credit as collateral in bank borrowing, especially by small and medium-sized firms. The paper models the incentives for a firm to collateralize accounts receivable as a trade-off between the benefit from lower...

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...

This paper analyses the market for professional (expert) services where the experts are motivated by reputational concerns. A key feature of such markets, which is often overlooked, is that clients can have specific characteristics that affect their evaluation of the service, and (or) the...

This paper analyses how banks organize their lending activity by using the results of two surveys carried out in 2006 and in 2009. During this period, the use of rating and scoring methodologies became more widespread even among the smaller banks. Larger banks used these techniques more...

This paper analyses respondents' behaviour when reporting their income sources in sample surveys and presents a method to deal with response error. Survey data relating to the number of earning recipients and to amounts received are validated using external information from administrative and...

We empirically characterize the sectoral distribution of firm size for a set of European countries, finding substantial differences. We then study the relationship between productivity growth at the sectoral level and size structure. We find a positive and robust association between average firm...

We investigate the prediction of Italian industrial production. We first specify a model based on electricity consumption; we show that the cubic trend in such a model mostly captures the evolution over time of the electricity coefficient, which can be well approximated by a smooth transition...

In this paper, a parametric cost frontier for the credit card market is specified (�stochastic frontier approach� - SFA) and robustness checks of the main results are performed. The aim is to provide some clues to: the x-inefficiency problem and determinants in a retail payment...