In 2005, the President of the Bank of Italy blocked the cross-border acquisition of two Italian banks for ?prudential reasons and formal errors?. Following these events, the EU Commission brought actions against Italy for infringement of the principle of the free movement of capital. Although...

The Italian and German banking systems shared similar characteristics early in the 1990s but have evolved in different directions since then: Italy privatized its publicly-owned banks while Germany has maintained a large share of state-owned savings banks. Contemporaneously, banks in both...

Most previous research on efficiency in banking takes a regulatory perspective. In contrast, this paper investigates the empirical relation between efficiency and profitability in five large economies of the European Union during the period 1998-2005 and discusses the results from the...

In 2005, the President of the Bank of Italy blocked the cross-border acquisition of two Italian banks for prudential reasons and formal errors. Because it became later public that both deals were not blocked for prudential reasons, but to protect domestic banks from foreign investors. A survey...

Employment protection systems are known to generate significant distortions in firms? hiring and firing decisions. We know much less about the impact of these regulations on worker effort. The goal of this paper is to fill in this gap and in particular to assess whether the provision of...

In this paper we study top executive turnover in Italian Banks over the period 1993-2001. We relate the probability of survival of top executives (Presidents, CEOs and General Managers) to bank performance and the manager's local connections, controlling for (observable and unobservable) bank...

Das italienische Bankensystem ist bislang recht gut durch die Coronakrise gekommen. Dazu haben umfangreiche staatliche Hilfsmaßnahmen ebenso beigetragen wie Vorkrisenreformen mit Blick auf Altlasten aus der Euro-Schuldenkrise. Dazu zählen der Abbau notleidender Kredite und der Aufbau von...

We examine the relationship between the number of bank relationships and firms’ performance, evaluating possible differential effects related to firms’ size. Our sample of firms from Italy includes many small firms, 99 percent of which are not listed and for which bank debt is a major source...