The topic of financing long-term investment is on the top of the agenda of economic policy makers and it is among the priorities of the Italian Presidency of the European Union. The paper describes the main international initiatives in the field and highlights the three most promising courses of...

The paper describes the characteristics of the market for private placements and discusses the necessary conditions for their uptake in Europe. A private placement is a method of financing used mainly by medium-sized companies which, unable to access the public bond market, turn to one or more...

This paper explores the implications of systemic risk in Credit Structured Finance (CSF). Risk measurement issues loomed large during the 2007-08 financial crisis, as the massive, unprecedented number of downgrades of AAA senior bond tranches inflicted severe losses on banks, calling into...

The focus of the present volume - which originates from a workshop held at the Bank of Italy on 16 and 17 April 2009 - is the regulatory response given to financial crises in the past, across countries. Alongside the scholarly interest of such a review its aim is also to offer some insights that...

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...

This paper studies the provision of incentives in a universal bank. This is regarded as a (common) agent serving different clients with potentially conflicting interests; for example, it may buy assets on behalf of investors and sell assets on behalf of issuing firms. The clients offer incentive...

This paper tests the role of different banks� liquidity funding structures in explaining the bank failures that occurred in the United States between 2007 and 2009. The results highlight that funding is indeed a significant factor in explaining banks� probability of default. By...

This paper develops a methodology for identifying systemically important financial institutions based on that developed by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (2011) and used by the Financial Stability Board in its yearly G-SIBs identification. The methodology uses publicly available data...

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 analyse the deleveraging process with reference to a sample of European banks from December 2011 to June 2013 and find that the leverage ratio (measured as assets to equity) has declined on average from 28.6 to 25.0. Its standard deviation fell from 8.2 to 6.5. About 2/3 of the deleveraging...