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...

Unemployment is one of the most visible effects of financial crises. We contribute to the empirical literature on the employment effects of a decline in bank credit, investigating individual heterogeneity across firms, workers and jobs in response to a financial shock. We use a rich data set of...

The paper estimates the effects on the real economy of the sharp reduction in the supply of credit following the 2008 financial crisis. We develop a measure of local credit supply that is based on the market shares of the banks that serve a local economy and the national change in each bank's...

The literature has shown that in the short- and medium-term bank mergers and acquisitions (M&As) may generate a temporary reduction in firm credit. Using bank-firm matched data, this paper investigates the impact of M&As involving Italian banks over the period 2009-2019 on credit to firms,...

Optimal Portfolio Theory prescribes that investors reduce their exposure to financial market risk as they get near to retirement. To assess the effect of ageing on portfolio choices, we study the case of an Italian defined contribution pension fund during the period 2002-08. We find that on...

This paper analyzes the effects of the financial crisis on credit supply by using highly detailed data on bank-firm relationships in Italy after Lehman's collapse. We control for firms' unobservable characteristics, such as credit demand and borrowers' risk, by exploiting multiple lending. We...