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...

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...

We study the impact of bank credit supply on firm output and productivity. By exploiting a matched firm-bank database which covers all the credit relationships of Italian corporations over more than a decade, we measure idiosyncratic supply-side shocks to firms' credit availability. We use our...

We analyse whether and to what extent both firm and bank soundness are associated with the use of collateral in bank lending, and whether these relationships changed during the global financial crisis and the euro-area sovereign debt crisis. By using a large dataset of 2 million observations at...

Multiple lending has been widely investigated from both an empirical and a theoretical perspective. Nevertheless, the implications of multiple lending for the stability of the banking system still need to be understood. By lending to a common set of borrowers, banks are interconnected and then...

This paper analyzes the role of bank credit in firms' export performance. We use Italian bank-firm matched data and contribute to the existing literature by focusing on the link between bank-credit and exports in 'normal times' (1997-2008) and measuring access to credit with hard data on the...