The aim of this work is to gauge the main determinants of EU banks’ dividend policies, by testing four theoretical assumptions, i.e. signaling, agency conflict (between shareholders and managers and between shareholders and creditors), life-cycle and regulatory pressure, on a sample of 79...

This paper estimates the elasticity of substitution across banks using matched bank-firm data and assuming monopolistic competition in local credit markets. It also quantifies the impact of credit supply shocks on corporate investment as shaped by this elasticity. Credit supply shocks have...

Policy evaluation based on the estimation of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models with aggregate macroeconomic time series rests on the assumption that a representative agent can be identified, whose behavioural parameters are independent of the policy rules. Building on earlier work by...

We study the impact of a 2011 law on the diversity of bank boards. The law required all listed companies in Italy (including banks) to increase the share of female representatives on their boards up to one third of total seats. We look at listed banks (the ones directly targeted by the law), but...

Banks’ holdings of sovereign bonds are an important component of the multifaceted bank-sovereign nexus. This paper exploits the unexpected increase in sovereign yields in Italy in May 2018 to quantify the impact of a drop in value of banks’ government bond portfolios on their supply of loans...

Linguistic and cultural differences, different legal and supervisory frameworks, and relationship lending have been repeatedly mentioned as barriers to European retail banking integration. We investigate whether these barriers have affected integration within national boundaries, using an index...

Interbank markets allow banks to cope with specific liquidity shocks. At the same time, they may be a channel allowing a bank default to spread to other banks. This paper analyzes how contagion propagates within the Italian interbank market using a unique data set including actual bilateral...

Following the debate on the relationship between business and financial cycle rekindled in the last decade since the global financial crisis, we assess the ability of some financial indicators to track the Italian business cycle. We mostly use credit variables to detect the turning points and to...

The paper investigates whether firms have better access to bank credit in areas with a larger degree of urbanization. It uses bank-firm data drawn from the Credit Register maintained at the Bank of Italy to devise an indicator of ease of access to credit. The paper proposes an instrumental...

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...