Giorgio Calcagnini

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.

Common trends and common cycles in international labor productivity

Abstract The objective of this paper is to present a trend-cycle decomposition of the industrial labor productivity series in six major industrialized countries, to study the relationship between trend and cycle innovations, and to highlight the role of monetary policy as a possible source of transitory and permanent variations in labor productivity.

The Italian Small- and Medium-Sized Firms in the Aftermath of the Crisis

The outbreak of the recent crisis that began at the end of the last decade eventually uncovered the problems that almost all Western economies had been able to camouflage thanks to economic growth fueled by an unprecedented expansion in the financial industry. Within this context the Italian economy is a special case: its annual growth rate has been lower than that of its traditional partners and competitors for the last 15 years. Even the most optimistic forecasts for the next several years do not indicate significant improvements in the Italian competitive position. The success it enjoyed following its participation in the European Monetary Union brought to the fore the structural backwardness of the Italian economy, which is the main reason behind its low growth rates. The complexity and costs investors face when starting a business, the complexity and inefficiency of the fiscal, credit, and the legal systems, the difficulties associated with investor protection are only some of the obstacles that entrepreneurs face at the time of investing in Italy. More recently, we need to add a new weakness, that – until a few years ago – was considered a key factor in its success, i.e., the size of Italian 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.

Componenti permanenti e transitorie degli investimenti in Italia

This paper studies the dynamic and stochastic properties of fixed investments (IL) for five Italian sectors and for the period 1930-1991. Moreover, it analyses the relationship between the trend and cyclical innovations of IL and between these two types of innovations with those of GDP, real money balances and the real interest rate. We find that the five sectors share four common trends, but only one common cycle. As for innovations, trend and cyclical innovations are in general negatively correlated with the single exception of GDP. Trend innovations are generally more important than cyclical innovations, but in the case of real money balances the opposite is true. Finally, we only find a statistically significant correlation between investment trend innovations and GDP trend innovations: a result which offers strong support in favor of the accelerative hypothesis, i.e. one of the most popular models in the study of investment decisions.

Financial Asset Demand in the Italian Market:an Empirical Analysis

The introduction of new investment instruments, i.e. long term debt instruments and derivatives contracts, and new market organization, as well as the opening of computerized systems for transaction processing, caused different behavior among Italian investors. In such a context an analysis of Italian asset demand may be useful to understand investors’ willingness to substitute debt securities with equities or other instruments. This could be particularly interesting in the view of an efficient financial instrument projecting realized by the Italian Treasury. The empirical analysis of Italian demand for financial instruments and the substitutability between various securities based on a set of monthly data starting from 1987 up to 1994, is provided. An analytical formalization of asset demand, following familiar equilibrium economic models is also provided.

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.

Market Insights: Nachhaltige Mobilität

Alternative Antriebe sind der Weg zur Sicherung einer nachhaltigen Mobilitat, jedoch werden sie bislang vom Markt wenig angenommen. Daraus ergibt sich die zentrale Forschungsfrage, wie die Bereitschaft der Verbraucher zum Umstieg auf einen nachhaltigen und klimafreundlichen Antrieb gefordert werden kann. Hierzu wurde deutschlandweit eine reprasentative hypothesengestutzte Befragung bei Pkw-Nutzern durchgefuhrt. Mittels dieser empirischen Studie mit dem Titel FUTURE MOBILITY konnten die Voraussetzungen und Motivationsfaktoren zur Umstiegsbereitschaft ermittelt werden. Die Erkenntnisse munden in Handlungsempfehlungen fur die Verantwortlichen in den Unternehmen aber auch in der Politik, die mit der Entwicklung und Forderung von alternativen Antrieben befasst sind.