In most countries household debt increased from the 1990s until the crisis of 2007-2008 before stabilizing due to recession and deleveraging. However, there are national differences in household debt/GDP ratios. This paper studies the determinants of household debt, using a 32-country dataset...

The paper offers a comparative analysis of household wealth in the main industrial countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Italy, France, Germany and Spain. Particular attention is devoted to Italy. We distinguish between financial wealth, real assets, indebtedness, and net...

The goal of this paper is to investigate the link between the length of a firm-bank relationship and firm's internationalization. The analysis is carried out on matched firm-bank micro-data from a survey of Italian enterprises from 1998 to 2003. We obtain two main results. First, a longer...