In the light of the fundamental role played by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the economy of many countries including Italy and of the specific treatment of this issue within the Basel II regulation, the aim of this work is to build a default prediction model for the Italian SMEs....

The Basel II capital accord has fostered the debate over the financial stability of the aggregate banking sector. There is a large empirical literature focused on the effects of macroeconomic disturbances on the banking system. Specifically, loan losses are an important factor for the banking...

The increasing use of internal market models for market risk assessment and management promotes, in compliance with Basel II, better risk management practices but introduces at the same time the so called model risk. In the light of the many open issues connected to market risk, the aim of this...

Financial constraints are particularly severe for R&D projects of SMEs, which cannot generally rely on equity markets and, in the EU, on a sufficiently developed VC industry. If innovative SMEs have to depend on banks to finance their R&D projects, it is particularly important to develop models...

Recent years witnessed commodity prices increases which have fostered research-works on their predictability and a renewed interest of practitioners and policy makers. The objective of this paper is to test the predictive ability of futures prices on the underlying spot prices by taking corn,...

As emphasized by the introduction of Basel II, the macroeconomic factors strongly affect credit risk variables. In order to account for the business cycle in a forward-looking way, a macroeconomic forecast can be introduced in the estimation of credit risk variables. This work proposes to model...

In this paper we investigate household financial fragility and assess the role played by the composition of the household portfolio besides standard determinants of this condition (e.g. income, indebtedness, age, gender, financial literacy). We take the case of Italy, given the very peculiar...