In the last decade the banks established in the Italian Mezzogiorno have reduced their cost-income ratios and improved their ability to screen customers, thus increasing their profitability. They have also widened the range of services they provide to customers. The spread between the cost of...

Regulation and contract enforcement may be important determinants of the development of the household loan market, as much as they are of the supply of corporate loans on which the literature has focused. This paper draws on the Italian experience to provide evidence that formal and informal...

Bank takeovers result on average in little improvements in performance. This may be due to conflicting driving forces behind them; however these have seldom been studied. We study directly the motivations for bank acquisitions by analyzing the prices paid for them, under the assumption that...

Is deregulation sufficient to grant free entry in local credit markets? Economic theory suggests at least two ways in which asymmetric information between incumbents and entrants can work as an endogenous barrier to entry. First, entrants� pool of applicants contains a larger share of...

In 2007 the new framework for capital adequacy of banks (Basel 2), defined in 2004 by the Basel Committee for Banking Supervision, will replace the 1988 Accord (Basel 1) in all major countries. In the last years the Committee has carried out several impact studies in order to simulate the...

The paper reviews the supply of different mortgage instruments to Italian households by means of data obtained from a survey conducted in 2007 by the Bank of Italy over more than 300 banks. The results document significant innovations in housing finance in the last five years: a greater variety...

This study analyzes the main characteristics of loans for house purchase issued in Italy between 2004 and 2007 employing the data on individual contracts from the Sample Survey of Lending Rates. Variables describing the type of mortgage and the borrower are related to the ex post probability of...

El presente estudio estima una frontera estocástica de costos con el fin de cuantificar el nivel de ineficiencia absoluta del sector bancario colombiano entre 1992 y 2002. Al mismo tiempo, se proponen distintos determinantes potenciales de dicha ineficiencia. dado que la industria bancaria ha...

In this paper we discuss cost and profit efficiency for a sample of financial institutions on the Colombian financial market in the period 1989-2003, using stochastic frontier efficiency analysis. During the period, the cost efficient frontier deteriorates, but profit efficient frontier is...