One of the most lively debated effects of banking acquisitions is the change in lending and asset allocation of the target bank in favour of transactional activities, at the expense of small and informational opaque borrowers. These changes may be the result of two distinct restructuring...

We estimate a remittance model in which we address endogeneity and reverse causality relationships between remittances, pre-transfer income and consumption. In order to take into account the fact that a large share of individuals do not remit, instrumental variable variants of the double-hurdle...

It is widely recognized that regional policies implemented in Southern Italy in the last 15 years have had poor effects in terms of Gdp, employment and firms' performance. This chapter seeks to put forth possible explanations of this unfortunate outcome and to predict the likely impact of the...

Given the changes that occurred in the organization and specialization of Italian industrial districts and the changing geography of the banking system, in this paper is we aim at reassessing the bank-firm relationship in industrial districts. Using firm-level data on a sample of Italian SME, we...

Increasing premiums, increasing claims and decreasing profits are three striking facts associated in some European countries to motor insurance liberalization of 1990's. In this paper, we argue that these phenomena may be considered not a consequence of collusion or other misapplications of...

In this paper we introduce new definitions of pairwise and multivariate similarity between short-run dynamics of inflation rates in terms of equality of forecast functions and show that in the context of invertible ARIMA processes the Autoregressive distance introduced by Piccolo (1990) is a...

Mutual Loan Guarantee Societies (MLGSs) are crucial players in credit markets of many European and non-European countries. In this paper we provide a theory to rationalize the raison d'e'tre of MLGSs. The basic intuition is that the foundation for MLGSs lies in the inefficiencies created by...

The linkages between law and finance are currently the centre of wideranging empirical investigations. This article analyse the effects of legal system efficiency on the functioning of the credit market by using a simple banking model with information asymmetries about borrowers'entrepreneurial...

A well-established result of the theory of antitrust policy is that it might be optimal to tolerate some degree of collusion among firms if the Authority in charge is constrained by limited resources and imperfect information. However, few doubts are cast on the common opinion by which stricter...