The banking industry is consolidating at an accelerating pace, yet not conclusive results have emerged on the benefits of mergers and acquisitions. We analyze the Italian market, which is similar to other main European countries.

Using a clustering procedure, we classify Italian funds ex-post on the basis of the composition of their portfolios and find that the optimal number of clusters is equal to 4. The four groups which result from the statistical classification closely match the 4-level aggregation of the 20 ex-ante...

We survey the existing work on the cross-country differences in the transmission of European monetary policy. We find that prior work, focusing on macroeconomic data, does not clearly answer the question posed in the title and offer some explanations for the ambiguity.

This paper constructs the series of the real returns on Italian equities, bank and PO deposits and long-term government bonds from 1860 to today.

This paper reconstructs the series of the real returns on Italian equities, bank and Post Office deposits and long-term government bonds from 1860 to today. In the long-run the return on shares was much higher than that on government securities and also that on bank and Post Office deposits....

A striking feature of financial market behaviour in recent years has been the low level of price volatility over a wide range of financial assets and markets. The issue has attracted the attention of central bankers and financial regulators due to the potential implications for financial...

A striking feature of financial markets behaviour in recent years has been the low level of price volatility over a wide range of financial assets and markets. The issue has drawn the attention of central bankers and financial regulators due to the potential implications for financial stability....

We examine the informational effects of Mamp;As by investigating whether mergers improve banks' abilities to screen their borrowers. By exploiting a dataset in which we observe a measure of a borrower's default risk which the lenders observe only imperfectly, we find evidence of these...