Government intervention in credit markets has been criticized as potentially conducive to distortions in the behaviour of both banks and firms. We argue that credit subsidies may lead to a decline in the level of screening performed by banks. This effect was at work in Italy in the early 1990s...

This paper analyses aggregate household wealth in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, the UK and the US. Building on a new data set for the time span 1980-2011, we discuss the trends in household financial assets in the last thirty years, the reasons for differences across countries,...

We show that a longer relationship length with the main bank fosters Italian firms' foreign direct investment (FDI) and, weakly, production off-shoring abroad. Possibly, longer bank relationships help secure external financing for these companies, which have become more opaque because of their...

Given the importance of banking intermediation, we investigate the determinants of the size of bank loans in 18 OECD countries in the period 1981-1997. The aim of the paper is to show that the ratio of government debt to GDP has a negative effect on the level of bank credit. Second, countries...

In this paper we present new estimates of the effect of household financial and real wealth on consumption. The analysis refers to eleven OECD countries and takes into account the years from 1997 to 2008. Unlike most of the previous literature, we exploit European quarterly harmonized data on...

This paper investigates the role of incumbents' market power in shaping the entry decisions of Italian banks after branching liberalization in 1990. Using a unique dataset on 260 banks, we find that entry over the 1990-1995 period was targeted towards markets that were more competitive to begin...