New data on the sources of finance for the nonfinancial corporate sector show that Italian firms as a whole use more equity finance than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts, and smaller Italian firms use equity more intensively than larger firms. Both findings can be understood in terms of the...

Changes in formal and informal central bank independence (CBI) in France, Italy and the UK in the period from the mid-1970s to the 1990s are examined; the major changes occurred in the 1990s, after the disinflations of the 1980s. Broad trends in the informal independence of central banks, defined...