In Italy, the strong competitive environment has progressively reduced the credit intermediation role of banks. For Italian banks, SMEs represent the most important segment among the corporate ones and many ICT products/services suppliers are now giving great attention to SMEs, since the market...

This paper merges industrial enterprise database, patent database, and financial licensing data to show that more bank branches near a firm promote its innovation. Mechanism analysis suggests that the reason is that more branches around firms reduce their financing constraints rather than their...

We develop an analysis of ex ante monitoring of risky projects in banking. If protected from competition, banks are more concerned about not catching good risk projects when the perceived state of the economy improves, while they are more concerned about being induced to finance bad risk...