A growing number of studies on the US subprime market indicate that, due to asymmetric information, credit risk transfer activities have perverse effects on banks� lending standards. We investigate a large part of the market for securitized assets (�prime mortgages�) in Italy, a...

A substantial literature has investigated the role of relationship lending in shielding borrowers from idiosyncratic shocks. Much less is known about how lending relationships and bank-specific characteristics affect the functioning of the credit market in an economy-wide crisis, when banks may...

We study how relationship lending and transaction lending vary over the business cycle. We develop a model in which relationship banks gather information on their borrowers, which allows them to provide loans for profitable firms during a crisis. Due to the services they provide, operating costs...

The global financial crisis has reaffirmed the importance of financial factors for macroeconomic fluctuations. Recent work has shown how the conventional pre-crisis prescription that monetary policy should pay no attention to financial variables over and above their effects on inflation may no...

We find evidence of a bank lending channel for the euro area operating via bank risk. Financial innovation and the new ways to transfer credit risk have tended to diminish the informational content of standard bank balance-sheet indicators. We show that bank risk conditions, as perceived by...

A large body of literature has shown that small firms experience difficulties in accessing the credit market due to informational asymmetries. Banks can overcome these asymmetries through relationship lending, or at least mitigate their effects by asking for collateral. Small firms, especially...

The aim of this paper is to design the optimal institutional arrangement for a monetary union. Using a two-country rational expectations model, the study analyses how the conservatism of the area-wide central bank and the penalty system for fiscal deviation (Stability and Growth Pact) should be...

This paper investigates the existence of cross-sectional differences in the response of lending to monetary policy and GDP shocks owing to a different degree of bank capitalization. The effects on lending of shocks to bank capital that are caused by a specific (higher than 8 per cent) solvency...

This paper investigates how bank profitability is affected by corporate income tax (CIT) using aggregate data on the banking sector of the main industrialized countries for the period 1981-2003. Two main novelties emerge with respect to the existing literature. First, the paper explicitly...

The process of European monetary integration has prompted interest in the study of differences in financial systems and their consequences for monetary transmission mechanisms. This paper analyses the case of a monetary union composed of countries with heterogeneous "credit channels". In order...