The literature on debt restructuring usually assumes that banks behave in a uniform way towards firms in distress. Using a recent survey of Italian banks, we show that banks follow different strategies when they decide whether to take part in the workout process, in that some of them do...

It is known that discretionary policy may give rise to an inflationary bias if wages are negotiated in nominal terms. It has recently been argued that this bias can be eliminated, and welfare maximized, by the appointment of a central banker who does not care at all about inflation (a "populist"...

We investigate the impact of information and communication technologies (ICT) on local loan officers� autonomy in small business lending. We derive a simple agency model of the interaction between a local branch manager and the headquarters, which yields an estimable equation for the...

We analyze the problem of strategic poaching of consultants by clients with particular reference to the business consulting industry. This article presents a market equilibrium in a mixed economy where three categories of agents, consulting groups, client firms and consultants strategically...

This paper asks whether and why advanced countries differ in their ability to export to China and India. We exploit a newly collected, comparable cross-country survey of 15,000 European manufacturing firms (EFIGE). The dataset contains information on firms� international activities and...

The volume collects the papers presented at the Conference on "Banks, Local Credit Markets and Credit Supply" held in Milan, on 24 March 2010. The papers presented at the two sessions of the Conference analyse how banks' lending activities are organized and how this affects the supply of credit...

The entry of China into world markets has been one of the strongest recent shocks to world trade and advanced countries. industrial sectors. This is particularly true for Italy where labour-intensive, low-technology production represents a large share of output. Using Italian manufacturing...

We conduct a regional analysis of the relationship between market concentration and price dynamics in the grocery retail sector, focusing on a sample of five categories of goods belonging to the 12 COICOP aggregation and on a panel of countries that includes Germany, Spain, Finland, Italy,...

In response to fundamental changes in regulation and technology, the financial industry around the world is undergoing an unprecedented wave of consolidation. A growing body of empirical literature has attempted to measure the efficiency gains from M&As; however there is little sense of how the...

The general conclusion of the empirical literature is that in-market consolidation generates adverse price changes, harming consumers. Previous studies, however, look only at the short-run pricing impact of consolidation, ignoring all effects that take longer to materialize. Using a database...