The main idea of this paper is that bank internationalization might encourage exports as banks' foreign branches and representative offices provide financial and informational support to exporting firms. This hypothesis has been tested using bank and firm data at Italian province-level between...

In this paper we investigate whether the banks' involvement in acquisitions is correlated with the distribution of decision-making powers in granting credit to SMEs across hierarchical levels and with loan officers' turnover. Controlling for size, performance and organizational characteristics,...

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....

Do financial crises have an impact on trade flows via a shock to corporate risk or to bank risk? Focusing on Italy's exports during a period characterized by both the global financial crisis and by the sovereign debt crisis, we exploit the prediction of standard trade models according to which...