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...

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...

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...

The aim of the paper is to understand the interaction between market and credit risk. Using a comprehensive set of Italian data, we apply a factor model to identify the common sources of risk driving fluctuations in the real and financial sectors. The common latent factors are then inserted in 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...

This paper shows how credit quality transition matrices of loans to Italian firms changed during a cyclical downturn (2008-09), compared with a previous time of growth (2006-07). Once transition matrices were linked to interest rates, banks appear to have been remarkably able at calibrating...