As a result of legal restrictions on branch banking, an extensive interbank system developed in the United States during the 19th century to facilitate interregional payments and flows of liquidity and credit. Vast sums moved through the interbank system to meet seasonal and other demands, but...

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...

Focusing on downgrades as stress events that drive the selling of corporate bonds, we document that the illiquidity of stressed bonds has increased after the Volcker Rule. Dealers regulated by the Rule have decreased their market-making activities while non-Volcker-affected dealers have stepped...

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...

Commercial banks increasingly use short-term wholesale funds to supplement traditional retail deposits. Existing literature mainly points to the "bright side" of wholesale funding: sophisticated financiers can monitor banks, disciplining bad ones but refinancing solvent ones. This paper models a...

We exploit variation in consumer price inflation across 71 Russian regions to examine the relationship between the perceived stability of the domestic currency and financial dollarization. Our results show that regions with higher inflation experience an increase in the dollarization of...

We study credit ratings on subprime and Alt-A mortgage-backed securities (MBS) deals issued between 2001 and 2007, the period leading up to the subprime crisis. The fraction of highly-rated securities in each deal is decreasing in mortgage credit risk (measured either ex-ante or ex-post),...