Using data on single credit relationships, the paper shows that after a merger or an acquisition, involving two or more banks which had previously jointly financed the same firm, the share of credit granted to the client by the consolidated intermediaries moderately decreases over three years....

In this paper I study two methods often used in public procurement to deal with the risk that the winning bidder may default on his bid: augmenting the standard first price auction with an ex-post verification of the responsiveness of the bids and using an average bid auction. I show that when...

We investigate the impact of information and communication technologies (ICT) on local loan officers' autonomy in small business lending. We derive a simple agency model of the interaction between a local branch manager and the headquarters, which yields an estimable equation for the optimal...

Using data on a sample of Italian manufacturing companies, this paper analyzes the location (at home or abroad) and the mode of organization (outsourcing versus integration) of intermediate inputs production. We find evidence of a productivity ordering (largely consistent with the assumptions in...

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...