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Deposit insurance is one of the main pillars of banking regulation meant to safeguard financial stability. In early 2009, the EU increased the minimum deposit insurance limit from €20,000 to €100,000 per bank account with the goal of achieving greater stability in the financial markets. Italy had already set a limit of €103,291 in 1994. We evaluate the impact of the new directive on the banks’ average interest rate on customer deposits by comparing banks in the Eurozone countries to those in Italy, before and after the policy change. The comparability between the two groups of banks is improved by means of a propensity score matching. We find that the increase in the deposit insurance limit led to a significant decrease in the cost of funding per unit of customer deposit and that the effect is stronger for riskier banks, suggesting that the policy reduced the risk premium demanded by depositors.

Using a survey of Italian households, we find that large income losses suffered during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 are associated with a decline in trust towards political (i.e. Italian Central Government and the EU Parliament) and financial (i.e. ECB and Italian commercial banks) institutions in the management of the Covid-19. The decline is lower for households who received public transfers in the wake of the pandemic. Our results highlight that household exposure to economic losses if not compensated by government income support measures are an important determinant of mistrust in institutions for the management of an economic crisis.

Using a survey of Italian households administered in November 2021, we study the effect of microeconomic and macroeconomic expectations about the health crisis and income growth on consumption expectations in 2022. The survey elicits individual-level indicators of income and consumption expectations, distinguishing between consumption at home, away from home, online and total. We find that expected household income and expected GDP growth are strongly related to consumption expectations; income risk is positively associated with expected consumption growth for richer households. Finally, our results indicate that health-related variables were not a major drivers of consumption expectations in 2022.

Using a new survey of Italian households, we study the effect of fear of COVID-19 contagion and income risk on consumption. The survey elicits individual-level indicators of fear of contagion, distinguishing between worries while working, shopping, traveling, eating out and meeting relatives or friends. We find that the probabilities of consumption drops and increased saving after the pandemics are positively associated to fear of contagion, particularly while shopping. Income uncertainty also contributes to savings increase and consumption drop. Our findings suggest that fear of contagion and income risk limits the effectiveness of policies aimed at stimulating consumption during the pandemic.

This paper assesses whether compensation practices for bank Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) changed after the Financial Stability Board (FSB) issued post-crisis guidelines on sound compensation. CEO compensation has become more sensitive to risk, with CEOs in the post-reform period at riskier banks receiving less variable compensation than those at less-risky peers. This was particularly true of investment banks. The changes in compensation practices are in line with the FSB’s Principles and Standards of Sound Compensation, although we do not detect significant differences between banks in jurisdictions that directly implemented the FSB guidelines compared to the other banks.

This paper quantifies how the welfare costs of the U.S. Great Recession are distributed across borrowing and saving U.S. households. For this purpose, we use a calibrated dynamic general equilibrium model of housing and household debt with shocks to aggregate income and shocks to the financial intermediation sector. The model matches the boom-bust cycle in house prices, the dynamics of household mortgage debt, and the increase in wealth inequality observed in the U.S. between 2001-2013. We find larger welfare costs of the Great Recession for borrowers than for savers. Borrowers experience a larger drop in consumption than savers who relatively benefit from a redistribution of housing wealth during the recession. We show that the size of this redistribution mechanism would have been significantly lower if (i) mortgage spreads would have remained at the low pre-crisis levels during the recession or if (ii) aggregate leverage would have remained at pre-2001 levels.

This paper studies the relation between CEOs’ monetary incentives, financial regulation, and risk in banks. We develop a model where banks lend to opaque entrepreneurial projects that need to be monitored by bank managers. Bank managers are remunerated according to a pay-for-performance scheme and their effort is not observable to depositors and bank shareholders. Within a prudential regulatory framework that imposes a minimum capital ratio and a deposit insurance scheme, we study the effect of increasing the variable component of managerial compensation on bank risk in equilibrium. We test the model’s predictions on a sample of large banks around the world, gauging how the monetary incentives for CEOs in 2006 affected their banks’ stock price and volatility during the 2007–8 financial crisis. Our international sample allows us to study the interaction between monetary incentives and financial regulation. We find that greater sensitivity of CEOs’ equity portfolios to stock prices and volatility is associated with poorer performance and greater risk at the banks where shareholder control is weaker and in countries with explicit deposit insurance.