Theoretically, corporate debt is economically equivalent to safe debt minus a put option on the firm’s assets. We empirically show that indeed portfolios of long Treasuries and short traded put options ("pseudo bonds") closely match the properties of traded corporate bonds. Pseudo bonds...

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...

The paper studies the causes of the current financial crisis and considers proposals for mitigation and prevention of future crises. The crisis is was the product of a ‘perfect storm’ bringing together a number of microeconomic and macroeconomic pathologies. Among the microeconomic systemic...

Using a newly-constructed data set on Israeli Initial Public Offering (IPO) firms in the 1990s, we study costs and benefits of universal banking. We find that a firm whose equity was underwritten by a bank-affiliated underwriter, when the same bank was also a large creditor of the firm in the...

We investigate directly whether analyst behaviour influenced the likelihood of banks winning underwriting mandates for a sample of 16,625 US debt and equity offerings sold between December 1993 and June 2002. We control for the strength of the issuer’s investment-banking relationships with...