Germana Giombini

The impact of guarantees on bank loan interest rates

This article analyses the role of guarantees on loan interest rates of Italian firms before and during the recent financial crisis. It improves on the existing literature by using explicit measure of collateral and personal guarantees and by modelling unobserved heterogeneity between low-level groups (banks) within a single nested panel data set. Our database covers the period 2006–2009 for a total of 560 339 firms and 214 banks. Our analysis shows that collateral guarantee affects the cost of credit for Italian firms by systematically reducing the interest rate of secured loans. This effect was larger during the crisis. Personal guarantees show no systematic effect on interest rates, but favour firms’ access to credit. Furthermore, guarantees are a more powerful instrument for riskier borrowers than for safer borrowers, i.e., the decrease in interest rates due to the presence of guarantees is larger for the former than for the latter.

Guarantees and Bank Loan Interest Rates in Italian Small-Sized Firms

The paper analyzes the role of guarantees on interest rates before and during the recent financial crisis in small-sized firm financing. The novelty of this work is the distinction between real and personal guarantees, and the potential different role they could have played in the bank-borrower relationship during the recent financial crisis.

Financial Models of Small Innovative Firms: An Empirical Investigation

This paper aims at analysing financial models of innovative firms in Italy by means of a sample of firms located in the Marche region. While it is well known that innovative firms have different financial needs and more severe problems in accessing funds than traditional firms, our analysis shows that only a small number of the interviewed firms have faced problems in raising external funds for innovation, even during the current economic and financial crisis. Policy recommendations point towards the improvement of firms’ levels of financial culture and the dilution of firms’ ownership by means of external private equity.

Credit availability and propensity to innovate of small and medium enterprises

We aim to analyze the impact of credit availability on firms’ probability to innovate. Using detailed information on more than five thousand five hundred credit lines to small and medium enterprises (SMEs), we find that innovative activities are positively affected by measures of bank loan availability. Further, estimates also show that firms located in an industrial district have higher probability to be innovative than other firms. Our results support the idea that Italian institutions should undertake and reinforce an economic policy oriented to sustain the access to credit of SMEs as a key element for the growth and development of innovative firms.

Cash Holdings, Firm Value and the Role of Market Imperfections. A Cross Country Analysis

In this paper we evaluate the empirical importance of the contemporaneous presence of financial and labor market imperfections by studying cross-country differences in market valuations of listed companies and firms’ cash holdings. Our results show that, as expected, financial market imperfections are positively correlated with firms’ cash holdings and that the latter are larger wherever employment protection laws (EPL) are stricter. Moreover, stock markets value liquid companies less in economies with higher EPL levels.

Bank foundations, social capital and the growth of Italian provinces

ABSTRACT The funding role of bank foundations in the Italian economy, especially to the non-profit sector, significantly increased over the last 25 years. This paper constructs a novel measure of social capital at the provincial level that explicitly takes into account the bank foundations’ sectors of intervention (such as education, public health, and art and culture), together with other traditional aspects of social capital, and then tests the impact of bank foundations on the economic growth of Italian provinces. The findings suggest that the contribution of bank foundations to social capital positively affects the economic growth of provinces.

Imprese innovative ed accesso al credito. Un’indagine empirica

Questo lavoro mira ad analizzare l’accesso al credito delle imprese innovative testando l’impatto della natura innovativa delle imprese: (a) sul costo del credito bancario; (b) sulla probabilita di restrizione del credito. L’analisi empirica utilizza le informazioni ottenute dall’unificazione di due database distinti e di diversa derivazione. Il primo database contiene informazioni di natura finanziaria su oltre 15.000 linee di credito concesse da un’istituzione bancaria ad imprese di diversa tipologia dimensionale e giuridica operanti in 23 settori industriali. Il secondo database identifica le imprese che svolgono attivita innovativa. Le stime econometriche mostrano che le imprese innovative hanno una minor probabilita di restrizione del credito rispetto a quelle tradizionali. L’innovazione si potrebbe dunque configurare una via per il superamento del credit crunch. Classificazione