This paper discusses the incentive conflicts that arise in banking supervision in the EU in a principal-agent framework, where the regulator is the agent and the taxpayers is the principal. The regulatory agent in addition to maintaining financial stability (the objective of the principal) may...

We examine the effects of the government guarantee schemes for bank bonds adopted in the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers demise to help banks retain access to wholesale funding. We describe the evolution and the pattern of bond issuance across countries to assess the effect of the schemes. Then...

Regulation requires banks to hold a minimum capital endowment upon their establishment. But what role does initial capital play in a bank's lifecycle? This paper addresses the issue for start-up banks. We use both survival-time and binary choice models for a sample of newly-established Italian...

The aim of this paper is twofold: first, to study the determinants of banks' net interest margin with a particular focus on the role of maturity transformation, using a new measure of maturity mismatch; second, to analyse the implications for banks of the relaxation of a binding prudential limit...

This paper characterizes the optimal banking union with endogenous participation in a two-country economy in which domestic bank failures may be contemporaneous to sovereign crises, giving rise to risk-sharing motives to mutualize bail-out funding. Raising public funds to conduct bail-outs...

The work analyses the characteristics of supply in the Italian credit market with a focus on the years 2009-2014. By using a new survey, I find that approximately 40 percent of the decline in business lending originates in the tightening of bank credit standards, with a significant decrease in...

The paper develops a theoretical framework to analyze the connection between the structure of banking networks and their resilience to systemic shocks. We base our analysis on the model of interbank contagion proposed by Cifuentes, Ferrucci and Shin (2005), which accounts for the impact of...

We quantify the gains from regulating banks' maturity transformation in an infinite horizon model of banks which finance long-term assets with non-tradable debt. Banks choose the amount and maturity of their debt trading off investors' preference for short maturities with the risk of systemic...

This paper investigates the ex-ante determinants of bank loan securitization by using different econometric methods on Italian individual bank data from 2000 to 2006. Our results show that bank loan securitization is a composite decision. Banks that are less capitalized, less profitable, less...

The Italian and German banking systems shared similar characteristics early in the 1990s but have evolved in different directions since then: Italy privatized its publicly-owned banks while Germany has maintained a large share of state-owned savings banks. Contemporaneously, banks in both...