The paper studies the impact of foreign ownership on a firm's economic performance. We use a unique panel dataset to test the foreign ownership premium by comparing our sample of firms based in Italy and owned by a foreign subject with a sample of purely domestic firms that, in order to have a...

A growing number of studies on the US subprime market indicate that, due to asymmetric information, credit risk transfer activities have perverse effects on banks' lending standards. We investigate a large part of the market for securitized assets (“prime mortgages”) in Italy, a country with...