Given the changes that occurred in the organization and specialization of Italian industrial districts and the changing geography of the banking system, in this paper is we aim at reassessing the bank-firm relationship in industrial districts. Using firm-level data on a sample of Italian SME, we...

One of the most lively debated effects of banking acquisitions is the change in lending and asset allocation of the target bank in favour of transactional activities, at the expense of small and informational opaque borrowers. These changes may be the result of two distinct restructuring...

This paper offers a methodological contribution to the empirical analysis of the relationships between banking and economic growth by suggesting a new indicator for the state of development of the banking system based on a measure of bank microeconomic efficiency. This choice helps to overcome...

Recent empirical findings by Elsas (2005) and Degryse and Ongena (2007) document a U-shaped effect of market concentration on relationship lending which cannot be easily accommodated by the investment and strategic theories of relationship lending. In this paper, we suggest that this...

In the early 1990s, a widely-shared opinion among scholars and practitioners was that the importance of physical proximity between banks and borrowers would be doomed to drastically decrease over time and, put in extreme terms, the end of banking geography would become a real possibility....

From the 1980s onwards the banking sectors in all the industrialised countries have been experiencing intense restructuring, aggregation and consolidation, radically changing their ownership structures and geography. Whatever the reasons behind such restructuring processes, the globalisation of...

Questo lavoro analizza le diverse fasi della recente crisi economico-finanziaria, ponendo l'accento sull'entita' del credit crunch in Italia e nel resto d'Europa, al fine di cogliere le similitudini ma, soprattutto, le differenze tra i paesi centrali e quelli periferici ell'area dell'euro, tra i...