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Abstract:
This paper offers a methodological contribution to the empirical analysis of the relationships between banking and economic growth by suggesting a new indicator for the state of development of the banking system based on a measure of bank microeconomic efficiency. This choice helps to overcome the problem of causality and to capture the effects of the banks' allocative activity. This new approach is then applied to analyse the relationship between the banking system and economic growth in the Italian regions, through a dynamic panel technique. The empirical results show the existence of an independent effect exerted by the efficiency of banks on regional growth.

Bank efficiency, Regional growth

Abstract:
While geographical diffusion of banking structures and instruments increased the operational proximity between banks and borrowers, the concentration of bank decisional centres widened the functional distance between banks and local communities. Our findings on Italian data show that increased functional distance makes local borrowers' financing constraints more binding, it being positively associated with the probability of credit rationing, with investment-cash flow sensitivity, with the ratio of credit lines used by borrowers to credit lines available and negatively associated with the scope for overdrawing. These adverse effects are particularly evident for small firms and for firms located in less developed provinces.

Local banking systems; Functional distance, Operational proximity, Financing constraints

Abstract:
One of the most lively debated effects of banking acquisitions is the change in lending and asset allocation of the target bank in favour of transactional activities, at the expense of small and informational opaque borrowers. These changes may be the result of two distinct restructuring strategies of the asset portfolio of the bidder bank. An asset cleaning strategy (ACS), in which the acquiring bank makes a clean sweep of all the negative net present value activities in the portfolio of the acquired bank, and an asset portfolio strategy (APS), in which the acquiring bank permanently changes the portfolio allocation of the acquired bank. In this paper we focus on Italian bank acquisitions and test which asset restructuring strategy was predominantly pursued over the period 1997-2003. Moreover, we estimate both a model for the whole Italian banking industry and a model for the acquired banks located in economic backward Southern regions. At the national level we find evidence of a primacy of ACSs over APSs. When we concentrate on bank acquisitions that occurred in the Mezzogiorno (Italy's Southern regions), evidence seems to reverse, i.e. APSs dominate over ACSs.

Bank acquisitions, Asset restructuring strategies, Small businesses lending

Abstract:
A growing body of research is focusing on banking organizational issues, emphasizing the difficulties encountered by hierarchically organized banks in lending to informationally opaque borrowers. While the two extreme cases of hierarchical and non-hierarchical organizations are typically contrasted, what shapes the degree of hierarchy and how to measure it remain fairly vague. In this paper we compare bank size and distance between a bank's branches and headquarter as possible sources of organizational frictions, by studying their impact on small firms' likelihood of introducing innovations. Results show that SMEs located in provinces where the local banking system is functionally distant are less inclined to introduce innovations, while the market share of large banks is only slightly correlated with firms' propensity to innovate.

Functional Distance, Bank Size, Innovation, SMEs

Abstract:
Given the changes that occurred in the organization and specialization of Italian industrial districts and the changing geography of the banking system, in this paper is we aim at reassessing the bank-firm relationship in industrial districts. Using firm-level data on a sample of Italian SME, we examine the determinants of credit rationing and relationship lending. Firstly, we test whether firms located in industrial district area have more access to banking credit and rely more on relationship lending. Secondly, we assess if being localized in industrial clusters have heterogeneous effects due to the structure of local credit markets. Our results point out the firms operating in industrial districts are less credit rationed, while their probability of relationship lending is not significantly different from the one of the average firm. Furthermore, a higher operational proximity of banks to local economies is associated with more access to banking credit and and to a lower probability of engaging in relationship lending, while a higher functional distance of the banking system from local communities is associated with tighter financing constraints and a lower probability of relationship lending. These effects are significantly intensified for firms located inside industrial districts.

Banche, distretti, distanza funzionale, relationship lending, razionamento

Abstract:
Economic and commercial relations between the countries of the southern Mediterranean and the European Union (EU) have been profoundly affected by the recent 'EU Initiative for the Mediterranean' and conditioned by the creation of European Monetary Union (EMU). The paper discusses the costs, benefits and prospects of these two processes in terms of their economic consequences on the countries of the southern Mediterranean, and in particular on the Tunisian economy. The association agreement between the EU and Tunisia is assessed in the light of its medium-period implications and of the EU?s enlargement to include the countries of Eastern Europe. With regard to EMU, the paper discusses the influence and effects exerted by introduction of the euro on the Tunisian economy.

Abstract:
A recent study by Giuliano and Ruiz-Arranz (2006) has provided evidence of substitutability between remittances and financial development in fostering economic growth in developing countries. In this paper, we introduce a new qualitative inefficiency indicator of the domestic banking system and show that migrants' remittances positively affect economic growth only in countries where domestic banks are sufficiently efficient. This complementarity result is robust to controls for other financial development and institutional quality indicators.

migrants' remittances, financial development, banks' efficiency, economic growth

Abstract:
In some European countries, the liberalization of the motor insurance market occurred in the 1990s led to increasing fares and claims with profits staying stable or decreasing. In this paper, we argue that these phenomena are due to the impact of liberalization on the companies' optimal choices. In particular, in the context of a spatial competition model, we show that in the short run price deregulation entails decreasing investments in monitoring and increasing indemnification costs, such that prices may increase while profits remain unaltered. In the long run, when the number of firms changes endogenously, premiums can be higher or lower than premiums prevailing under regulation, according to the dominance of a "competition effect" connected to entries or a "monitoring effect" raising marginal costs.

Motor insurance, Spatial models, Regulation

Abstract:
In the early 1990s, a widely-shared opinion among scholars and practitioners was that the importance of physical proximity between banks and borrowers would be doomed to drastically decrease over time and, put in extreme terms, the end of banking geography would become a real possibility. However, the empirical evidence show an unrelenting importance of local credit markets for small borrowers and local economic development. In the paper, we selectively review the literature on the real effects of bank consolidation and produce new evidence on the role of headquarter-to-branch functional distance on relationship lending.

Global Banking, Local Banking Development, Functional Distance

Abstract:
Recent empirical findings by Elsas (2005) and Degryse and Ongena (2007) document a U-shaped effect of market concentration on relationship lending which cannot be easily accommodated to the investment and strategic theory of relationship lending. In this paper, we show that this non-monotonicity can be explained by looking at the organisational structure of local credit markets. We provide evidence that marginal increases in interbank competition are detrimental (favourable) to relationship lending in markets where transaction-based loans are a primary (limited) product offered by a vast (tiny) group of large, outside headquartered banks. On the contrary, where relational-based lending technologies are already widely in use in the market, an increase in competition may drive banks to further cultivate their extensive ties with customers. Finally, we show that when competition comes from functionally distant banks, local intermediaries increase their engagement in relationship lending with local firms, consistent with the flight-to-captivity mechanism introduced by Boot and Thakor (2000) and further discussed by Dell'Ariccia and Marquez (2004) and Hauswald and Marquez (2006).

Interbank competition, market organisational structure, relationship lending

Abstract:
Does participation in inter-firm networks make access to credit easier for firms? Is finance a motivation driving the formation of inter-firm networks? During the last twenty years these two questions have been hotly debated by economists both theoretically and empirically. In this paper, we selectively review the literature on inter-firm networking, internal capital markets and access to external credit.

inter-firm networks, internal capital markets, access to credit

Abstract:
A well-established result of the theory of antitrust policy is that it might be optimal to tolerate some degree of collusion among firms if the Authority in charge is constrained by limited resources and imperfect information. However, few doubts are cast on the common opinion by which stricter enforcement of antitrust laws definitely makes market structure more competitive and prices lower. In this paper we challenge this presumption of effectiveness and show that the introduction of a positive (expected) antitrust fine may drive firms from partial cartels to a monopolistic cartel. Moreover, introducing uncertainty on market demand, we show that the social optimal competition policy can call for a finite or even zero antitrust penalty even if there are no enforcement costs. We first show our results in a Cournot industry with five symmetric firms and equilibrium binding agreements. Then we extend the analysis to the case of n symmetric firms and a generic rule of coalition formation. Finally, we consider the case of asymmetric firms and show that our results still hold for an industry populated by one Stackelberg leader and two followers.

Coalition formation, Collusive cartels, Antitrust policy

Abstract:
In this paper we study the relevance of the gender of the contracting parties involved in lending. We show that female entrepreneurs face tighter access to credit, even though they do not pay higher interest rates. The effect is independent of the information available about the borrower and holds if we control for unobservable individual effects. The gender of the loan officer is also important: we find that female officers are more risk-averse or less self-confident than male officers as they tend to restrict credit availability to new, unestablished borrowers more than their male counterparts.

Gender-based discrimination, Female-owned enterprises, Loan officers

Abstract:
The intimate linkages between law and finance are currently the centre of wide-ranging empirical investigations. This article presents a simple banking model with information asymmetries concerning borrowers' entrepreneurial talent. It is shown that improvements in the enforcement of contract by courts reduce agency problems but can also reduce the bank's incentive to screen borrowers adequately, thus worsening credit allocation. A stricter enforcement of credit contracts, therefore, may be socially harmful even if costlessly achieved. Improvements in accounting standards, however, always make bank screening of borrowers less costly and improve credit allocation and social welfare.

Abstract:
The theoretical literature has identified potential benefits and costs of close bank-firm relationships for both parties, suggesting possible reasons for firms being captured by banks and vice versa. In this paper we empirically explore the effects of long-lasting credit relationships on employment and asset growth of a large sample of Italian manufacturing firms in the period 1998-2003. The main findings are that relationship lending hampers the efforts of small firms to increase their size (especially in terms of employees), while it mitigates the negative growth of troubled, medium-large enterprises, thus supporting the hypothesis that small firms are captured by banks which, in turn, are captured by large firms.

relationship lending, capture effects, firms’ growth

Abstract:
In this paper we investigate the relationship between product market competition and managerial incentives within a circular city model with observable agency contracts. With respect to the case of unobservability studied by Raith (2003), we find that optimal managerial contracts provide lower incentives, and that equilibrium expected prices and profits are higher. Changes in competition fundamentals have ambiguous effects, but observable contracts alleviate their impact on incentives. Finally, observability involves three major implications: managerial incentives are higher under price regulation than under competition; prices may increase with the number of firms; consumer welfare may diminish when competition increases.

Abstract:
For many countries, remittance behaviour by migrants is an important component of their overall international financial flows. The empirical literature has, so far, analysed the propensity to remit as a function of migrants' socio-economic characteristics. However, no studies have fully addressed the empirical implications of remittance behaviour being determined in the broader context of migrants' labour, income and consumption allocation strategy. On the contrary, the migrant's income has almost always been treated as exogenous in this context. The aim of this study is to estimate a remittance equation that detects the main determinants of remittance behaviour while addressing endogeneity and reverse causality relationships between remittances, income, consumption and savings. Moreover, since a large share of individuals do not remit money at all, an instrumental variable variant of the double-hurdle selection model is proposed and estimated by LIML. A sending country perspective is adopted in the empirical analysis by considering the first cohort of the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Australia. We find that endogeneity is substantial and that estimates obtained by the methods previously employed in the literature may be very misleading if given a behavioural interpretation. Our results confirm some theoretical predictions and shed light on others; notably, we show that "selfish" motives in remitters are at least as important as "altruistic" motives.

migrants' remittances, double-hurdle models

Abstract:
In many countries, Mutual Loan-Guarantee Societies (MLGSs) are assuming ever-increasing importance for small business lending. In this paper we provide a theory to rationalise the raison d'^etre of MLGSs. The basic intuition is that the foundation for MLGSs lies in the inefficiencies created by adverse selection, when borrowers do not have enough collateralisable wealth to satisfy collateral requirements and induce self-selecting contracts. In this setting, we view MLGSs as a wealth-pooling mechanism that allows otherwise inefficiently rationed borrowers to obtain credit. We focus on the case of large, complex urban economies where potential entrepreneurs are numerous and possess no more information about each other than do banks. Despite our extreme assumption on information availability, we show that MLGSs can be characterized by assortative matching in which only safe borrowers have an incentive to join the mutual society.

Mutual Loan Guarantee Society, group formation, small business lending, collateral

Abstract:
In the early 1990s, a widely shared opinion among scholars and practitioners was that the importance of physical proximity between banks and borrowers would be doomed to decrease drastically over time and, put in extreme terms, the end of banking geography would become a real possibility. However, the empirical evidence shows the continued importance of local credit markets for small borrowers and local economic development. In this paper, we selectively review the literature on the real effects of bank consolidation and produce new evidence on the role of headquarter-to-branch functional distance on relationship lending.

global banking, local banking development, functional distance

Abstract:
Bank deregulation and progress in information technology altered the geographical diffusion of banking structures and instruments, and reduced operational distance between banks and local economies. Although, the consolidation of the banking industry promoted the geographical concentration of banking decision-making centres and increased functional distance between local banking systems and local borrowers. This paper focuses on the impact that these spatial diffusion-concentration phenomena had on the financing constraints of Italian firms over the period 1996-2003. Our findings show that greater functional distance stiffened financing constraints, especially for small firms, while smaller operational distance did not always enhance credit availability.

G21, G34, R51.

Abstract:
We analyze the effect of human capital obsolescence due to the introduction of technological innovations on the long-run growth rate, and show that in equilibrium the pace of technical change may be faster than is socially optimal. In such cases, the existence of market imperfections, and their costs for firms, may improve the welfare for the society as a whole. In particular, we assume that firms do not have full information on workers' skills but can arrange some form of internal training that permits them to acquire the lacking information. Training costs reduce research and development investments by firms and in this way draw the market equilibrium closer to the social optimum.