This paper examines the impact of the pandemic outbreak on Italian insurers’ investment decisions between 2017 and 2020. By adopting a unique security-by-security holding dataset, we test how the investments of insurance companies in a single security varies when its price changes. Our...

We show that bank supervision reduces distortions in credit markets and generates positive spillovers for the real economy. Exploiting the quasi-random selection of inspected banks in Italy, we show that financial intermediaries are more likely to reclassify loans as non-performing after an...

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...

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...

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...

We investigate the relationship between the rumours on Twitter regarding banks and deposits growth. The sentiment expressed in tweets is analysed and employed for the nowcasting of retail deposits. We show that a Twitter-based indicator of sentiment improves the predictions of a standard...

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...

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...

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...