We study the public loan guarantee programs implemented in Italy in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. Guided by a theoretical model and relying on a unique loan-level dataset covering the period between December 2019 and March 2021, including both guaranteed and non-guaranteed loans, we...

Italian startups financed by venture capitalists (VCs) experience a faster growth in size and become more innovative compared with other startups. VC-backed firms also show a much larger increase in equity and a reduction in their leverage. This evidence is obtained by comparing a representative...

Policy evaluation based on the estimation of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models with aggregate macroeconomic time series rests on the assumption that a representative agent can be identified, whose behavioural parameters are independent of the policy rules. Building on earlier work by...

We examine the effects of the government guarantee schemes for bank bonds adopted in the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers demise to help banks retain access to wholesale funding. We describe the evolution and the pattern of bond issuance across countries to assess the effect of the schemes. Then...

I analyze the risk premium on bank bonds at origination with special focus on the role of implicit and explicit public guarantees and the systemic relevance of issuing institutions. Looking at the asset swap spread on 5,500 bonds, I find that explicit guarantees and sovereign creditworthiness...

The literature on debt restructuring usually assumes that banks behave in a uniform way towards firms in distress. Using a recent survey of Italian banks, we show that banks follow different strategies when they decide whether to take part in the workout process, in that some of them do...

This paper studies the effect of credit scoring by banks on bank lending to small businesses by addressing the following questions: does credit scoring increase or decrease the propensity of banks to grant credit? Does it improve the selection of borrowers? Does credit scoring improve or reduce...

Given the importance of banking intermediation, we investigate the determinants of the size of bank loans in 18 OECD countries in the period 1981-1997. The aim of the paper is to show that the ratio of government debt to GDP has a negative effect on the level of bank credit. Second, countries...