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...

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 looks at the characteristics of Italian non-financial firms that accessed the bond market for the first time between 2002 and 2013. The results of logit estimations indicate that first-time bond issuers are significantly larger and more frequently listed on the stock exchange than...

In this paper we investigate the governance structure of Italian pensions funds. First, we conduct a brief but critical review of the theoretical and empirical literature, in order to identify the areas where major improvements are necessary: a) the skills and competence of the trustees; b) the...

We empirically analyse the returns of both Italian and round-trip open-end funds managed by Italian asset management companies (SGRs) in the period 2003-2008. Taking into account a modified version of the capital asset pricing model (CAPM), we estimated a performance measure for each asset...

In most advanced countries, future retirees will have to rely less on social security schemes and more on private pension plans, which mostly leave to the worker the choice between ashing-in or annuitizing pension wealth at retirement. Therefore, a better understanding of the determinants of the...

Standard risk metrics tend to underestimate the true risks of hedge funds because of serial correlation in the reported returns. Getmansky, Lo, and Makarov(2004) derive mean, variance, Sharpe ratio, and beta formulae adjusted for serial correlation. Following their lead, we derive adjusted...

Using a unique data set, this paper describes the main features of the venture capital industry in Italy. Operations by Italian specialised venture capitalists are only in part devoted to small, young firms from advanced industries, have a rather short duration and are weakly focused on a few...

In this paper we conduct an empirical analysis of daily log-returns of Italian open-end mutual funds and their respective benchmarks in the period from February 2007 to June 2013. First, we estimate the classical normal-based model on the log-returns of a large set of funds. Then we compare it...

We develop a macroeconomic model in which commercial banks can offload risky loans onto a �shadow� banking sector and financial intermediaries trade in securitized assets. We analyze the responses of aggregate activity, credit supply and credit spreads to business cycle and financial...