This paper offers a comprehensive comparison of the structure of banking and financial markets in the euro area. Based on this, several hypotheses about the role of banks in monetary policy transmission are developed. Many of the predictions that have been proposed for the U.S. are deemed...

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...

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 paper reviews the quantitative methods used at selected central banks to stress testing credit risk, focusing in particular on the methods used to link macroeconomic drivers of stress with bank specific measures of credit risk (macro stress test). Stress testing credit risk is an essential...

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 objetivo de este trabajo es proporcionar una visión de conjunto del mercado hipotecario en Colombia y su relación con los principales determinantes que se encuentran a nivel internacional. Nuestras recomendaciones apuntan a examinar la cadena productiva y obtener un mejor entendimiento de...

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...