Do financial crises have an impact on trade flows via a shock to corporate risk or to bank risk? Focusing on Italy's exports during a period characterized by both the global financial crisis and by the sovereign debt crisis, we exploit the prediction of standard trade models according to which...

Using unique matched bank-firm data on export, import and ordinary loans for a large sample of Italian manufacturing exporters for the years 2007-2010, this paper investigates the role of trade finance in a credit shock. We find that the credit shock faced by exporters in the aftermath of the...

This paper focuses on how multi-plant firms allocate their workforce and investments between headquarters or plants located in or close to the headquarters area (HQ plants) and those located in the same country but farther away from the headquarters area (non-HQ plants). Using survey data on...

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...

This paper presents an exploratory agent-based model of a real time gross settlement (RTGS) payment system. Banks are represented as agents who exchange payment requests, which are settled according to a set of simple rules. The model features the main elements of a real-life system, including a...

In the recent banking literature on the relationship between credit risk and the business cycle, the presence of asymmetric effects both across credit risk regimes and through the business cycle has been generally neglected. Employing threshold regression models both at the aggregate and the...

This paper investigates how bank profitability is affected by corporate income tax (CIT) using aggregate data on the banking sector of the main industrialized countries for the period 1981-2003. Two main novelties emerge with respect to the existing literature. First, the paper explicitly...