We investigate compensation policies in family and non-family firms using a novel employer-employee matched dataset comprising nearly the universe of Italian incorporated firms and ownership information. Family firms pay significantly lower wages and offer slower and less rewarding careers....

We forecast the drop in profits and the equity shortfall triggered by the COVID-19 lockdown, using a representative sample of 80,972 Italian firms. A 3-month lockdown entails an aggregate yearly drop in profits of about 10% of GDP and results in financial distress for 17% of the sample firms,...

A European banking union is necessary to ensure the stability of the European financial system. This paper assesses the EU Commission's proposals for legislation to create a banking union in Europe. The EU Commission's proposal for a regulation creating a single supervisory mechanism is strongly...

Monetary, macro-prudential and micro-prudential policies are intimately linked. The macroprudential authority should be allocated to the body where the overall balance of synergies (between policy objectives) over conflicts and the required expertise are the largest. This report reviews the pros...

Banking has grown too much in Europe - in three senses. First, the European banking system has reached a size where its contribution to real economic growth is likely to be nil or negative. Second, the European financial structure is biased towards banks (rather than securities markets), which...

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,...

Using novel monthly data for 226 euro-area banks from 2007 to 2015, we investigate the causes and effects of banks’ sovereign exposures during and after the euro crisis. First, in the vulnerable countries, the publicly owned, recently bailed out and less strongly capitalized banks reacted to...

In both the subprime crisis and the euro-area crisis, regulators imposed bans on short sales, aimed mainly at preventing stock price turbulence from destabilizing financial institutions. Contrary to the regulators’ intentions, financial institutions whose stocks were banned experienced greater...

In earlier work we documented two episodes in which a sharp fiscal consolidation was associated with a very large expansions in private domestic demand. In this paper we draw on further evidence to investigate if and when fiscal policy changes can have such non-Keynesian effects. In the first...