1,721,007 research outputs found
L'evoluzione del sistema bancario meridionale: problemi aperti e possibili soluzioni
No full textLe banche meridionali hanno attraversato una profonda crisi nel periodo tra il 1993 e il 1997, crisi che ha portato al loro sostanziale assorbimento da parte del sistema bancario centro-settentrionale. Gli autori, attraverso una analisi attenta dei bilanci delle banche, dei flussi di credito e del loro costo, forniscono un quadro completo e approfondito delle conseguenze di tali fenomeni, con particolare riferimento al mercato del credito del Mezzogiorno nel periodo 1990-2002
Financial intermediation as a source of aggregate instability
Get PDFWe consider a simple overlapping generations economy where the behavior of intermediaries, in a market characterized by asymmetric information and moral hazard, may give rise to cyclical equilibria. When capital increases output and savings also increase, and therefore more capital will be available in the following period. At the same time, however, interest rates also decrease and this induces intermediaries to reduce the amount of resources devoted to monitoring. A larger number of firms will select low quality projects and, because of this, less capital will be produced in the following period. For some parameter values this second effect may prevail over the first one and the stock of capital in period t+1 may actually be lower than the stock of capital in period t. The model provides a rigorous interpretation of the view associated with Hyman Minsky [14], Charles Kindleberger[12], and Henry Kaufman[11], according to which expansions come to an inevitable end because of excessive or ill-considered lending that took place during the boo
Capital accumulation under different financial agreements
No full textThis paper develops a simple overlapping-generations model where agents’ income is given both by a stochastic endowment and by the profits generated by a production activity. The purpose is to analyze the consequences of different forms of financial agreements on capital accumulation.
In this model, Pareto optimality requires that the capital stock is a deterministic function of the
previous level of capital. Agents can eliminate any randomness in the capital-accumulation
process when contingent claims markets are available. When standard loan contracts prevail
because of asymmetric information, the economy incurs an efficiency loss due to capital-stock fluctuations. The expected level of capital under this last regime is always smaller than the one
achieved when markets for contingent claims exist
Screening in the credit market: the role of collateral
No full textIn this paper, we study the role of collateral in the market for business loans when the problem of adverse selection arises. Exploiting the monotonic relationship that exists between the riskiness of firms and their collateral-interest rate trade-off, banks try to induce self-selection among firms. Even when restrictive regularity conditions are imposed on the model, we show that there are serious limits to the possibility of using collateral as a screening device. We prove that the possibility of screening firms according to their riskiness crucially depends on the
proportion of low- and high-risk firms, and we study the properties of the second-best contracts that prevail in the market
Bank shareholding and lending: complementarity or substitution? Some evidence from a panel of large Italian firms
No full textThe paper studies the motivations behind banks’ shareholding of non-financial firms using a panel of large Italian companies in the
period 1994–2000. Empirical evidence shows that banks are shareholders of companies that are less profitable, have experienced slower
growth, are more indebted, are endowed with collateral and have hard time to repay their debt out of current income. Banks are more
likely to hold shares in companies they lend to. Overall the evidence suggests that there is complementarity between bank equity holding
and lending. A plausible explanation is the shareholder–debtholder conflict, the evidence is weakly compatible with governance and
information hypotheses
Monetary Policy and Automatic Stabilizers: the Role of Progressive Taxation
Get PDFWe study the effects of progressive labor income taxation in an otherwise standard New Keynesian (NK) model. We show that progressive taxation (i) introduces a trade-off between output and inflation stabilization and affects the slope of the Phillips Curve, (ii) acts as automatic stabilizer changing the responses to technology shocks and demand shocks, and (iii) alters the prescription for the optimal monetary policy. The welfare gains from commitment decrease as labor income taxes become more progressive. Quantitatively, the model reproduces the observed negative correlation between the volatility of output, hours, and inflation and the degree of progressivity of labor income taxation
Liquidity externalities and the Wallace conjecture
No full textThis paper presents a pure currency economy with a nondegenerate distribution of money
holdings in which, as conjectured by Wallace (Quarterly Journal of Economics 129,
259–274, 2014), there are transfer schemes financed by money creation that improve ex
ante welfare relative to no-intervention. Differently from what was advocated by Wallace,
pecuniary-like externalities, rather than the need to share liquidity risks, are responsible
for the result
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