Laura Pellegrini

Microfinance institutions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America: an empirical analysis of operational efficiency, institutional context and costs

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the operational efficiency of microfinance institutions. Using a cross section of 750 microfinance institutions operating in Asia, Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, the analysis shows that operating costs and efficiency are negatively related. More specifically, operating costs are lower when institutions are more focused on traditional financial aspects of commercial banking, thereby improving their efficiency, and enhancing the development of the sector and the quality of offered services. Successively, the study takes into consideration how these above described relationships are declined in different geographical areas. Additional explanations to the observed outcome highlight the importance of different legal and institutional frameworks and of features of macro-governance.

Interconnectedness and Systemic Risk of European Banks Over the Recent Crises

The recent financial turmoil has stimulated a rich debate in the banking and financial literature on the identification of the determinants of systemic risk, as well as of devices to forecast and prevent crises. In this paper, we explore the contribution of corporate variables on the systemic risk in a CoVar approach, as recently proposed by Adrian and Brunnermeier (2010, 2011, 2014). Using a unique sample of 141 European banks belonging to 24 European countries, continuously listed from 2006Q1 to 2012Q4, we investigate the impact of corporate variables over several regimes that characterised the European context in recent years, namely the subprime crisis (2007Q3-2008Q3), the European Great Financial Depression (2008Q4-2010Q2) and the sovereign debt crisis (2010Q3-2012Q4). There is evidence that size has not played a significant role in spreading systemic risk, the contrary holds true for maturity mismatch. However, the nature and the intensity of these two determinants vary across the three crises.

Does Corruption Matter? The Impact of Corruption in Share Returns of Listed Industrial Companies in Euro Area

Corporate finance literature has devoted much effort in analysing stock returns and in developing models in order to precisely forecast their yields on the market, because of the different useful purposes of these forecasts that animate economic life of countries and corporations. Following a new approach (Bellavite Pellegrini, 2008) in order to measure the relevance of impact of control variables on returns of European stocks since the introduction of Euro and sharing the sample in different portfolios according to different capitalization, this research develops the issues underlined contributing to the identification of a further control variable affecting stock performances: corruption. The goal of this study is an enquiry about the connections between European industrial stock returns and a macroeconomic index of corruption in order to assess the impact of corruption in the performances of listed European industrial companies. This paper is organized as follows: the first paragraph is a brief introduction with an outline of surveys in the Law and Economics literature, paragraph two focuses its attention on data and methodology and paragraph three implements an empirical analysis in order to verify the importance of the above mentioned control variable of corruption in industrial listed companies of European countries. Concluding remarks and some suggestions in order to develop this issue will follow in the last paragraph.