This paper analyzes the investment choices of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) by country and industry in the last twenty years. Assets under management increased from $500 billion in 1995 to $4.7 trillion at end-2011. Based on a specially constructed data set, comprising 2,740 equity deals...

This paper provides an assessment of the costs of complying with Basel III for the Italian economy. The main findings are the following. For each percentage point increase in the capital ratio implemented over an eight-year horizon, the level of GDP would decline by 0.00-0.33% (0.03-0.39% if...

The Basel Committee for Banking Supervision designed a system of risk weights (the so called standardised approach) to measure the riskiness of banks� loan portfolios. Its ability to adequately reflect risk is empirically investigated in this paper, through an analysis of the economic...

In recent years, banks have become increasingly aware of the credit risk borne in lending in the interbank market and they select their counterparties accordingly. They may also fear that if they come across a bad borrower, rescue plans will be skewed towards domestic creditors; moreover,...

Large and growing international financial linkages between East and West have altered the nature of the stability risks faced by European banking systems, increasing susceptibility to contagion. This paper aims to identify potential risks of cross-border contagion using a sample of large Western...

We exploit highly disaggregated bank-firm data to investigate the dynamics of foreign vs. domestic credit supply in Italy around the period of the Lehman collapse, which brought a sudden and unexpected deterioration of economic conditions and a sharp increase in credit risk. Taking advantage of...

The aim of the present note is to outline a general, but at the same time comprehensive, framework of the array of instruments that regulators can use in their activity of prudential regulation and supervision. Such a framework should be applicable to a variety of geographical and historical...

Why do some countries suffer from backward financial institutions and weak corporate governance rules? We show that, even if, overall, the economy would benefit corporate governance reforms, not all the agents would stand to gain from the improvement. In particular, entrepreneurs and firms that...

This paper studies the effects of differences in local administrative burdens in Italy in the years preceding a major reform that sped up firm registration procedures. Combining regulatory data from a survey on Italian provinces before the reform (costs and time to start a business) with...

We provide an assessment of the determinants of the risk premium paid by non-financial corporations on long-term bonds. By looking at 5,500 issues in the period 2005-2012, we find that the turbulence in the sovereign debt market has been a major driver of corporate risk in recent years. Compared...