This paper investigates the determinants of the investment activity of Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) at a macro level, with special emphasis on the possible reaction to a financial crisis in a potential target economy. The analysis relies upon a specially built proprietary database, which...

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...

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,...

This paper investigates which factors determine a bank's decision to expand its activities abroad and what determines its choice of the countries to invest in. The empirical analysis is conducted using firm-level data on foreign subsidiaries for a representative sample fo nearly 2,500 OECD banks.

This paper argues that the liberalization of capital inflows in a small open economy with a financial system dominated by banks may provoke a soft budget constraint distortion, because large amounts of funds become available at relatively low cost. International investors internalize the risk of...

Using data from Ufficio italiano dei cambi for the period 1997-2001, the study analyses the distribution of foreign direct investment (FDI) outflows by sector and local area of origin. It tries to identify which local industrial structures determine a larger propensity to invest abroad, focusing...

A number of empirical studies have analyzed the effect of agglomeration on multinational investment, verifying whether the agglomerated areas attract foreign direct investment inflows. Despite the large number of papers, no systematic attempt has been made to disentangle whether FDI are...

In this paper we investigate two potential channels of international technology transfer towards developing countries: trade and foreign direct investments. We study the extent to which, through these channels, research and development expenditures (R&D) performed by advanced countries affect...

We analyse the evolution of emerging market loan spreads at a more disaggregated level than other current studies, providing statistical support to the assumption of the "speciality" of the international interbank market, to the extent that the pricing of interbank credit is insensitive to the...

The substantial amount of undeclared foreign assets reported by disclosure schemes and analyses of international balance of payments statistics suggest that foreign assets held by Italians, as is the case in other countries, are greatly underestimated, in particular in the sector of portfolio...