The euro crisis was fueled by the diabolic loop between sovereign risk and bank risk, coupled with cross-border flight-to-safety capital flows. European Safe Bonds (ESBies), a union-wide safe asset without joint liability, would help to resolve these problems. We make three contributions. First,...

In most of the postwar period Italy featured an abnormally high saving rate in comparison to that of most other industrialized countries. But this is no longer true. Under any definition, in the last decade the Italian saving rate has fallen below the average of the developed economies. Why was...

Theory predicts that information sharing among lenders attenuates adverse selection and moral hazard, and can therefore increase lending and reduce default rates. We construct a new international data set on credit bureaus and public credit registers. The theoretical predictions are broadly...

In talent-intensive jobs, workers’ quality is revealed by their performance. This enhances productivity and earnings, but also increases layoff risk. Firms cannot insure workers against this risk if they compete fiercely for talent. In this case, the more risk-averse workers will choose less...

We distill evidence about the effects of COVID-19 on companies. Stock price reactions to the shock differed greatly across firms, depending on their resilience to social distancing, financial flexibility, and corporate culture. The same characteristics affected the response of firms' sales,...