New data on the sources of finance for the nonfinancial corporate sector show that Italian firms as a whole use more equity finance than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts, and smaller Italian firms use equity more intensively than larger firms. Both findings can be understood in terms of the...

This paper studies the impact of the reform of the Employees Severance Indemnity (ESI) fund on Italian firms’ capital structure for a sample of 4680 Italian firms observed over the period 1991-2000. We find that, controlling for various factors affecting firms’ total leverage, ESI is a...

In this paper we model and empirically test the impact of banks' shift towards financial services on their screening activity and on the quality of their loans. We present a model where it is easier to sell services to positively evaluated loan applicants and we show that the larger the banks'...