This paper examines whether the regulatory approach adopted by banks to calculate capital requirements has a different impact on the loan rates for public and private companies when financial market conditions change. Using Italian data for the period 2008-18, the analysis documents that the...

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...

Does regional income inequality affect a household's likelihood of being indebted? This question is addressed by using survey data on Italian households. The analysis shows that inequality in the regional income distribution has a negative effect on the probability of being indebted. In...

We study the mobility of Italian firms across different lending banks in the aftermath of Lehman Brothers' collapse, when 40 per cent of the firms analysed changed their pool of lending banks. Using a unique dataset on a sample of about 3,000 Italian firms that encompasses financial and economic...

We examine the delinquency rate for mortgages originated before and after the 2008 financial crisis, using a novel and large representative panel obtained by merging data from tax records and credit registers. First, we estimate the selection into the mortgage market using an exogenous index of...

This paper provides measures of credit rationing in the market of term loans to Italian non-financial firms. We identify non-price allocations of credit by exploiting a unique bankfirm dataset of more than 5 million observations, which matches the quantity and the cost of credit available from...

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...

Systemic risk and systemic importance are two different concepts that came out of the crisis and are now widely employed to assess the potential impact on the banking system as a whole of shocks that hit one specific bank. However, those two measures are often improperly used and...

Unemployment is one of the most visible effects of financial crises. We contribute to the empirical literature on the employment effects of a decline in bank credit, investigating individual heterogeneity across firms, workers and jobs in response to a financial shock. We use a rich data set of...

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...