We studied the impact of major floods occurring in Turkey between 2005 and 2020 on lending and the allocation of loans between sectors that differ in their CO2 emissions. Our evidence shows that the floods are not significant determinants of lending or the allocation of loans between sectors, even though CO2 emissions contribute to the reallocation of loans from the more polluting to the less polluting sectors. Indeed, risks and returns of the sector remain the main determinants of lending and of the allocation of loans among sectors. The results are robust to alternative estimation methods and specifications of the econometric models. Since in the period of investigation no environmental regulations were implemented in Turkey, and the Paris Agreement was ratified only at end-2021, the evidence suggests that more stringent regulations and green policies are required to accelerate the green transition in Turkey.

We use the Italian Statistical Institute survey that comprises about 80,000 questionnaires representative of the overall population between 15 and 90 years old to estimate the impact of chronic migraine on absenteeism and labour productivity. Using an ordinary least squares method to determine the direct effect of chronic migraine on labour productivity, we show that a 10 per cent increase in the number of people with chronic migraine increases absenteeism by 11 per cent and reduces labour productivity by 1.1 per cent per year. However, the effects of chronic migraine on absenteeism and labour productivity vary substantially between regions and sectors. Also, the comorbidity of chronic migraine with other illnesses, especially psychological illnesses, contributes to decreasing labour productivity. Most important, the results obtained at the micro level are similar and even more robust at the macro level. The results refer to a specific country, but we claim they can apply to other countries.

Objective:We investigate whether and to what extent income dissatisfaction (ID) is an important determinant of migraine. Indeed, ID may play a more relevant role in migraines than realized income, and it may affect both low and high-income people. Design:We exploit the Italian Statistical Institute (ISTAT) survey covering about 80,000 individuals for this study. On the methodological ground, an instrumental variable probit model has been implemented. Main Outcome Measures:To measure income dissatisfaction we exploit a self-reported status ranging from 1 to 4, while the migraine variable captures whether the individual suffers from migraine. Results:The results show that the higher the ID the greater the probability of having a migraine. This relationship is robust to the level of realized income, socioeconomic characteristics of the individual, and the existence of other illnesses. Conclusions:The high relevance of ID among low-income as well as high-income people opens up a new perspective on the determinants of migraines and provides an explanation of the contrasting evidence in the literature about the income-migraine nexus.

We use a large sample of US banks to construct a new indicator of managerial beliefs based on bank provisioning. This indicator does not only anticipate a future charge-off but also explains future loan growth and other variables. In particular, the indicator shows that an increase in managerial optimism (pessimism) leads to expanded (tight) lending, leverage, and a riskier (less risky) portfolio. Our findings confirm that widespread managerial optimism (pessimism) prevailed before (during) the 2007-2008 financial crisis and that changes in managerial beliefs played an important role in the lending and leverage cycles.

Abstract The paper analyses the impact of a preventive measure aimed at fighting the criminal organizations’ activities on the bank-firm relationship in the four Italian regions with the highest density of mafia over the period 2004–2016. Taking advantage of the staggered firm-level anti-mafia enforcement actions, we implement a difference-in-differences approach and find that after entering judicial administration mafia-infiltrated firms experience a 19 per cent contraction of bank credit and have a higher probability of being credit rationed than a matched sample of legal companies. We also find that firms confiscated from the mafia experience a negative change in some demand-driven (value of production) and supply-driven (profitability) determinants of loans. Finally, we study whether confiscation of infiltrated firms produces externalities on non-infiltrated companies, and show that banks do not reassess the overall credit risk in local markets.

We use a unique and unexplored dataset to investigate the determinants and effects of mafia firms in Italy. Mafia may use several tools to expand its firms. However, in this paper, we show that they prefer political corruption to violence to expand mafia firms. In particular, they use the latter more to build up their reputation in new established regions. Mafia firms hamper entrepreneurial activity but they can have beneficial effects on unemployment if mafia firms add to not substitute current economic activities. Policy makers should take account of this twofold effects of mafia firms.

Article 127 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union establishes that the primary objective of the European Central Bank (ECB) is to maintain price stability.In this paper we propose that the ECB fund a transition-job for anyone willing and able to work, at a wage fixed by the ECB, for the further purpose of enhancing the achievement of its single mandate of price stability. In addition to superior price stability, the transition-job will define a form of full employment and work to balanced economic growth.Estimations of this proposal and the ongoing ECB's unconventional monetary policy show that public purpose is best served by the selection of the alternative buffer stock policy that is directly managed by the ECB. (C) 2017 The Society for Policy Modeling. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

In this paper we analyze options for the European Central Bank (ECB) to achieve its single mandate of price stability. Viable options for price stability are described, analyzed, and tabulated with regard to both short- and long-term stability and volatility. We introduce an additional tool for promoting price stability and conclude that public purpose is best served by the selection of an alternative buffer stock policy that is directly managed by the ECB.

The international comparative evidence on the nexus between finance and growth is ambiguous, owing to the many difficulties in isolating finance, separating its growth effect from that of the other factors. To overcome this problem, we study the effects of financial development on growth from 1960 to 2010 in one country—Italy. Thus, we have the same political, legal and regulatory framework but also sharply differing development conditions between regions. After World War II, Italy achieved an “economic miracle” similar to what China and India are now experiencing, followed by a lengthy phase of decline. Accordingly, we can distinguish the effect of financial development on growth from other potential causal factors while also considering regions with sharply different economic conditions. Our results show that from 1960 to 1980, when the Italian “economic miracle” was still under way, finance played no significant role in favouring the surge in economic growth, which most likely depended on internal consumption. Between 1980 and 2010, by contrast, the great expansion of Italian financial markets and institutions did have a positive effect on regional economic performance, but overall growth rates were nevertheless low. Although our empirical evidence supports the view that finance is more important for growth in less highly developed regions, it also shows that financial development has not helped to overcome the Italian economic divide.

The main purpose of the paper is to investigate the market valuation of accounting information in the European banking industry before and after the adoption of IFRS, the latest version of International Accounting Standards. In a value relevance framework, we apply panel methods to a multiplicative interaction model, in which the partial effects of earnings and book value on share prices are conditional on the adoption of IFRS. According to our evidence, the IFRS introduction enhanced the information content of both earnings and book value for more transparent banks. By contrast, less transparent entities did not experience significant increase in the value relevance of book value.

The advanced countries are now going through the worst crisis since the Depression, but today's dominant current theories and econometric models proved unable to predict the crisis. The paper investigates whether the financial instability hypothesis of Hyman P. Minsky offers a better explanation. Minsky argued that in a period of economic growth and tranquility economic agents are more prone to take risk, and banks are more willing to finance borrowers. Meanwhile, in the course of the boom over-indebtedness and financial innovations make the financial system more fragile, and more exposed to adverse effects. We show that both these effects made themselves felt in the subprime loan crisis. Specifically, the main determinants of the crisis have been the increasing appetite for risk and financial innovations. So, we conclude that, although this crisis differs in some of its features from previous crashes and from Minsky's account, the mechanisms underscored by Minsky were and are nevertheless at work.

The paper deals with the effects of the new capital requirements (Basel II) on banking behaviour. Since the core of the new rules is the greater sensitivity of regulatory capital to the borrowers' risks, we investigated whether banks react to the new rules by differentiating their lending behaviour accordingly. Our theoretical conclusions indicate that as banks switch from Basel I to Basel II rules, they reallocate loans from high-risk to low-risk borrowers, while making interest rates more sensitive to probability of default. An econometric study using Italian data supports both these conclusions. Specifically, we find that as banks adapt to Basel II interest rates on loans do become more sensitive to default risk. In addition, an increase in the interest rate reduces the availability of credit in Southern regions, but increases it in the Centre-North. These results suggest that under Basel II higher-risk firms are likely to pay more for loans, and that firms located in the South are likely to be more severely affected.

In this paper, we seek to empirically assess which determinants of the capability and incentives of banks to screen and monitor firms are significant in explaining credit rationing to Italian SMEs. After testing for the presence of non-random selection bias and the potential endogeneity of some determinants of interest, the probit model results we obtain suggest that the average banking size and the multiple banking relationship phenomenon are statistically significant factors affecting credit rationing, presumably through their impact on the aforementioned banks' capability and incentives. Other potential determinants of banks' incentives to monitor and screen, such as local banking competition and firm' capacity to collateralize, are never significant. However, when we split the sample according to the level of competition in credit markets, we find that the estimated marginal effects of all significant determinants of interest are larger in absolute value than those obtained when using the whole sample.

We investigate the market valuation of accounting information in the European banking industry before and after the adoption of IFRS, the latest version of International Accounting Standards (IAS). Building on Ohlson (1995), we apply panel methods to a multiplicative interaction model in which the partial effects of earnings and book value on share prices are conditional on the adoption of IFRS. According to our evidence, the IFRS introduction enhanced the information content of both earnings and book value for more transparent banks. By contrast, less transparent entities did not experience significant increase in the value relevance of book value.

The paper examines the main factors that affect the incentive to cooperate in R&D, inquiring into the effects of cooperation on incentives to innovate in both a complete and an incomplete contract framework. It considers several forms of cooperative agreements and studies the circumstances that make one type of cooperation, more likely than others, to emerge. Theoretical considerations suggest that two of the main factors are uncertainty and spillovers. Further, the incentive to cooperate may be greater or less among symmetric than among asymmetric firms, depending on the source of the asymmetry. When firms cooperate, in most cases they prefer a research joint venture, but because of transaction costs, moral hazard and adverse selection problems other forms of cooperation in R&D may occur. Uncertainty and spillovers also affect the size and the nature of coalitions, and in some circumstances competing research joint ventures may be formed. Finally, the paper surveys the empirical evidence and discusses its consistency with the theoretical conclusions.

In a dynamic patent race model we analyze the formation and breakup of joint ventures in relation to: (a) the relative as well as absolute position of the firms in the race; (b) the degree of competition in the ex post market. Fudenberg et al. (1983) studied the main features of a patent race when firms compete in R&D, showing that firms in the same position compete fiercely, dissipating the rent from innovation. By contrast, we show that if firms can cooperate or compete in R&D, and if they start in the same position, they cooperate at the outset but break their agreement in the last stage if they will be serious competitors in the downstream market, while, if they can collude in the ex post market, they cooperate from the outset and they innovate jointly. When the firms are lagged by one step, cooperation does not take place, except in the case the value of the race is negative and the cost saving due to cooperation is large. However, cooperation never occurs if the leader is more than one step ahead. Finally, when the firms cooperate in R&D they proceed to the discovery at low speed. We test these conclusions via experiments on the incentive to cooperate during the course of a race. The results of a sample of 86 races support our theoretical conclusions, although the experimental findings are less clear-cut than the theoretical ones.