There is a broad consensus that the quality of the political system and its institutionsare fundamental for a country’s prosperity. The paper focuses on political events inItaly over the past 35 years and asks whether the adoption of the euro in 1999 hashelped insulate Italy’s financial...

We study how the structure of housing finance affects the transmission of monetarypolicy shocks. We document three main facts: first, the features of residentialmortgage markets differ markedly across industrialized countries; second, and accordingto a wide range of indicators, the transmission...

[...]This paper aims to ascertain the quality (that is, thepredictive power and prediction errors) of two marketindicators: the distance to default and the subordinated debtspread. Previous work has established that banks’ marketprices reflect contemporaneous information about bank riskin the...

This paper investigates the financing conditions of non-financial corporations in theeuro area. We develop a new firm classification based on micro data by distinguishingbetween three groups of firms: unconstrained, relatively and absolutely constrainedfirms. We also provide further evidence on...

We test whether firms with a single bank are better shielded from loss of credit and investment cutsin periods of adverse cash flow shocks than firms with multiple bank relationships. Our estimatesof the cash flow sensitivity of investment show that both types of firms are equally subject...

Volatilities implied from interest rate swaptions are used to assess the size and thesign of the compensation for volatility risk, for dollar, euro and pound rates at a dailyfrequency, between October 1998 and August 2006. The measurement of the volatilityrisk premium rests on a simple model...

We study both theoretically and empirically the interdependence of lending decisions in differentcountry branches of a multinational bank. First, we model a bank that delegates the management of itsforeign unit to a local manager with non-transferable skills. The bank differs from other...

We analyze the interlinkages between foreign direct investment (FDI) and foreignportfolio investment (FPI) between Germany and the major economies. First, we show thatTobin’s q helps explaining the variation of the growth rate of the stock of FDI. Second, weshow that foreign and the home stock...

This paper presents new evidence on the patterns of price and wage adjustment inEuropean firms and on the extent of nominal rigidities. It uses a unique dataset collectedthrough a firm-level survey conducted in a broad range of countries and covering varioussectors. Several conclusions are drawn...

Using the Consensus Economics dataset with individual expertforecasts from G7 countries we investigate determinants of disagreement (crosssectionaldispersion of forecasts) about six key economic indicators. Disagreementabout real variables (GDP, consumption, investment and unemployment)has a...