The introduction of the euro notes and coins in the first two months of 2002 was followed by a lively debate on the alleged inflationary effects of the new currency. In Italy, as in the rest of the euro area, survey-based measures signaled a much sharper rise in inflation than measured by the...

The paper argues that the traditional difficulty encountered in finding evidence on the effects of credit availability on economic activity depends on the fact that these effects are powerful but rare and vary with the cycle. The global financial crisis offers an opportunity to test this...

We examine the delinquency rate for mortgages originated before and after the 2008 financial crisis, using a novel and large representative panel obtained by merging data from tax records and credit registers. First, we estimate the selection into the mortgage market using an exogenous index of...

We study the effect of the increase in Italian sovereign debt risk on credit supply on a sample of 670,000 bank-firm relationships between December 2010 and December 2011, drawn from the Italian Central Credit Register. To identify a causal link, we exploit the lower impact of sovereign risk on...

We estimate a fully-fledged structural system for the housing market in Italy, taking into account the multi-fold link with bank lending to both households and construction firms. The model allows the house supply to vary in the short run and the banking sector to affect the equilibrium in the...

We present the first empirical study of information spillover and signalling on loan search and its outcomes in a setting where a bank observes whether a loan applicant has already been rejected by other lenders. We do so by taking advantage of the fact that Italy�s Central Credit Register...

This paper studies the implications of introducing large monopolistic banks, which can affect macroeconomic outcomes and thus the response of monetary policy to inflation, in a model with a collateral constraint linking the borrowers� credit capacity to the value of their durable assets....

We estimate a structural econometric model for the credit market in Italy, using bank-level information and the responses of Italian banks to the euro-area Bank Lending Survey to identify demand and supply, focusing on the recent financial crisis. The main results are the following. First, while...

After the crisis, from 2008 to 2010 the share of indebted households decreased both owing to a reduction in loan demand and stricter supply conditions. The reduction regarded mortgages and involved low-income households and the self-employed. Recourse to consumer credit remained stable; it...

Using information on about 2 million house purchase loans to households, this paper analyses the effects of the financial crisis on this portion of the credit market. From 2008 to 2011 the total number and value of new mortgages decreased sharply. The results show that young households and...