The solution adopted in Basel II to deal with procyclicality of capital requirements (i.e. through the cycle ratings and long-run average estimates of default probabilities) implies a reduction in the risk-sensitivity that contradicts the original spirit of the new framework.In order to preserve...

Italian firms are top users of trade credit in an international comparison. The paper offers some clues to the determinants of this stylised fact exploiting the answers of about 1900 manufacturing firms on a wide range of contractual features, separately for domestic and foreign customers. The...

A new approach to search for structural breaks in the retail lending rates pass-through in the wake of EMU is proposed and implemented for Italy and Portugal. The econometric exercise shows that breakpoints cluster in the second semester 1999 and that the passthrough on short term lending is, in...

This paper investigates whether size and speed of the pass-through of market rates into short term business lending rates have increased in the wake of the introduction of the euro. Allowing for multiple unknown structural breaks we find two in four EMU countries, and in the UK as well, and a...

The harmonized MIR retail interest rates for the euro area, available as of January 2003, show remarkable differences both in levels and dynamics with the previous unharmonized NRIR rates. This evidence should suggest caution in extrapolating the findings of the NRIR-based literature on the...

A new approach is proposed for searching multiple unknown breaks, possibly associated with EMU, in the short term business lending rate pass-through. Multiple breaks are detected in five out of nine countries of the euro area. The last break occurs much before the start of EMU for France,...

The study, aimed at evaluating the likely effects of the EC Directive on late payments, provides direct evidence that interfirm credit received by Italian manufacturing firms is, if ever, only slightly more expensive than bank loans. An econometric exercise shows that financial determinants have...

La creazione di valore e stata oggetto di significativa attenzione nel dibattito economico- agrario, nazionale e internazionale, degli ultimi anni, portando allo sviluppo di nuovi approcci teorici che hanno permesso di reinterpretare i processi di riposizionamento funzionale dell’impresa...