prolonged recession as well as structural factors that have held back NPL write-offs by banks. The paper discusses the … impediments to NPL resolution in Italy and a strategy for fostering a market for restructuring distressed assets that could …

We model EU countries? bank ratings using financial variables and allowing for intercept and slope heterogeneity. We … find that country-specific factors (in the form of heterogeneous intercepts) are a crucial determinant of ratings. Whilst … ?new? EU countries typically have lower ratings than ?old? EU countries, after ontrolling for financial variables, all …