We use Italian data on bank lending to firms to study the transmission of shocks affecting bank balance sheets to the volume and cost of credit granted to business borrowers and to the probability of banks accepting loan applications from new borrowers during the 2007-2008 financial crisis. The...

Questo lavoro analizza gli effetti dell'entrata di nuove banche nei mercati locali del credito, studiandone congiuntamente le conseguenze sulle quantita', sui tassi di interesse e sulla rischiosita' dei prestiti alle imprese. L'analisi econometrica Š condotta su un data set panel contenente...

Consolidation in the banking industry of many countries has reduced the number of small banks and led to significant shifts in market shares; deregulation has fostered entry in local credit markets and branch expansion, which in turn have increased competition. Small businesses are believed to...

We empirically investigate the relevance of demand-side complementarity between electronic and traditional provision of banking services. Since no systematic data on prices for the two types of services is available, it is not possible to estimate cross-elasticities of demand. We resort to two...

Corporate governance theory predicts that leverage affects agency costs and thereby influences firm performance. We propose a new approach to test this theory using profit efficiency, or how close a firm's profits are to the benchmark of a best-practice firm facing the same exogenous conditions....

This paper investigates the empirical relationship between competition in the financial sector and the creation of firms in the non-financial sector. It presents new empirical evidence suggesting that competition in banking is more detrimental (or less favorable) to the emergence of new firms in...

This paper analyzes the relationship between the terms on bank loans and local crime rates, employing a sample of over 300,000 bank-firm relationships. Controlling for firm, market and bank characteristics the results show that where the crime rate is higher borrowers pay higher interest rates,...

We investigate the effects of competition in the banking sector on the creation of firms in the non-financial sector, explicitly allowing for heterogeneous effects across borrowers characterized by different degrees of asymmetric information. We find evidence of a bellshaped relationship between...