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...

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,...

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...

We examine the relationship between education and mortality in a young population of Italian males. In 1981 several cohorts of young men from specific southern towns were unexpectedly exempted from compulsory military service after a major quake hit the region. Comparisons of exempt cohorts from...

The real estate sector is of particular interest from a central bank's perspective; due to its size, it directly and indirectly affects economic developments, financial stability and the monetary policy stance. The volume collects the papers by economists of the Bank of Italy and the discussions...

This paper studies the determinants of Chinese households� saving. Domestic saving in China is the highest in the world in terms of GDP and it is mirrored in a large and persistent current account surplus. First, we show that notwithstanding the rising contribution of government and firms...

In this paper I estimate the impact of changes in real and financial wealth � proxied by house and stock market prices � on private consumption for a panel of sixteen emerging economies in Asia and Central and Eastern Europe. Using recent econometric techniques for heterogeneous...