The investment of the ECB reserves in US dollars and yen involves an annual performance assessment of portfolio managers, located in the Eurosystem's national central banks. Employing new data on individual portfolios during 2002-2009, we study this peculiar tournament and show the existence of...

Using a comprehensive dataset of Italian SMEs, we find that differences between private and public information on firm creditworthiness affect the decision to issue traded debt securities. Specifically, holding public information constant, firms with better private fundamentals are more likely...

We study the performance of a group of foreign exchange reserve managers that are responsible for investing the ECB's official reserves in US dollars, for a value of around $43 billion, using a new dataset which includes detailed portfolio holdings from 2006 to 2010. The ECB reserve managers...

We analyse a change in the degree of transparency of MTS, the electronic inter-dealer market for Italian Government bonds, namely the July 1997 move to the anonymity of quotes. Our evidence supports the hypothesis that a decrease in transparency makes liquidity traders worse-off, whereas...

This paper analyzes the uniform price auctions for Italian Treasury securities in 1995-1996 and examines the revenue-efficiency of the auction mechanism, employing an extremely detailed dataset which includes all transactions made by the 41 primary dealers on the screen-based secondary market...