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We employ a representative sample of 80,972 Italian firms to forecast the drop in profits and the equity shortfall triggered by the COVID-19 lockdown. A 3-month lockdown generates an aggregate yearly drop in profits of about 10% of GDP, and 17% of sample firms, which employ 8.8% of the sample’s employees, become financially distressed. Distress is more frequent for small and medium-sized enterprises, for firms with high pre-COVID-19 leverage, and for firms belonging to the Manufacturing and Wholesale Trading sectors. Listed companies are less likely to enter distress, whereas the correlation between distress rates and family firm ownership is unclear. (JEL G01, G32, G33)

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.

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.

Defence date: 20 March 2014 Examining Board: Professor Nicola Pavoni, Università Bocconi (Supervisor); Professor Árpád Ábrahám, European University Institute; Professor Hans Degryse, University of Leuven; Professor Steven Ongena, University of Zurich. First made available online on 15 May 2014. This thesis consists of three manuscripts that analyze the role of financial intermediation in the Great Recession from both a microeconomic and macroeconomic perspective. Although these papers differ in the adopted methodologies, they share the idea that, to evaluate the real effects of the last recession, we need a deeper study of financial intermediation. The first chapter of this thesis is joint work with L. D'Aurizio and L. Romano. It documents the credit allocation by Italian banks following the failure of Lehman Brothers. The empirical analysis reveals that Italian family firms experienced a significantly smaller contraction in granted loans than non-family firms. It is showed that the difference in the amount of credit granted to family and non-family firms is related to an increased role for soft information in Italian banks' operations. The second chapter, joint work with D. Menno, quantifies the welfare effects of the drop in aggregate house prices for leveraged and un-leveraged households in the Great Recession. It features a dynamic general equilibrium model calibrated to the U.S. economy and simulates the 2007-2009 Great Recession as a contemporaneous shock to the financial intermediation sector and aggregate income. The estimates show that borrowers lost significantly more in terms of welfare than savers. In counter-factual experiments it has showed that this loss is larger the higher the households' leverage. The third chapter documents the relation between bank performance in the 2007-2008 financial crisis and CEO monetary incentives in a cross-country analysis. Results suggest that the sensitivity of CEOs' stock-option portfolios to share prices (option delta) in 2006 have strong predictive power for ex-post bank performance. By exploiting the cross-country variability in financial regulation, results show that incentives to take risk given by stock options are stronger in countries with explicit deposit insurance and weaker restrictions on bank investments. First made available online on 15 May 2014.

This paper quantifies the effects of credit spread and income shocks on aggregate house prices and households’ welfare. We address this issue within a stochastic dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous households and occasionally binding collateral constraints. Credit spread shocks arise as innovations to the financial intermediation technology of stylized banks. We calibrate the model to the U.S. economy and simulate the Great Recession as a contemporaneous negative shock to financial intermediation and aggregate income. We find that (i) in the Great recession constrained agents (borrowers) lose more than unconstrained agents (savers) from the aggregate house prices drop; (ii) credit spread shocks have, by their nature, re-distributive effects and - when coupled with a negative income shock as in the Great Recession - give rise to larger (smaller) welfare losses for borrowers (savers); (iii) imposing an always binding collateral constraint, the non-linearity coming from the combination of the two shocks vanishes, and the re-distributive effects between agents’ types are smaller.

In this paper we study how access to bank lending during the recent financial crisis differed between family and non-family firms. Our theoretical prediction is that the presence of a family block-holder in the company attenuated the agency conflict in the borrower-lender relation, because of the higher non-monetary cost of default entailed in this type of corporate ownership structure. Because this information is to a large extent soft, we further investigate the interaction between the family firm status and the screening technology adopted by banks. Using highly detailed data referred to Italy, we exploit the change in the credit allocation following Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy. We find that family firms experienced a contraction in granted credit lower than non-family firms. Results are robust to ex-ante differences between the two types of firms and to bank-specific shocks. In line with our prior, banks that increased the role of soft information in their lending practices reallocated credit towards family firms.

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 firm-level survey information, we investigate whether relationship lending affects firms’ employment decisions in the face of negative sales shock. We find that firms with a durable relationship with their main bank display significantly less employment growth sensitivity to such shocks, especially where these are transitory. The result is stronger for younger and smaller firms that benefit from tighter bank-firm relationships, and for firms in sectors or economic environments where the costs of employment adjustment are greater. Our findings indicate that relationship lending provides liquidity insurance to firms to meet their demand for labor hoarding.

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.

In early 2009 the EU increased the minimum deposit insurance limit from €20,000 to €100,000 per bank account. Italy was the only country with a limit already set to €103,291 from 1994. To evaluate the impact of the new directive we run a diff-in-diff analysis and compare the bank-size weighted average deposit interest rates of the Eurozone countries with the Italian ones. We find that the increase of deposit insurance leads to a decrease of deposit rates in European countries relative to Italy between 0.3 and 0.7 percentage points. The drop in deposit rates is confirmed by a diff-in-diff analysis run at bank level after implementing a propensity score matching of Italian banks with European ones. We finally show that this effect mainly come from riskier banks confirming that deposit insurance negatively affects deposit rates by reducing the depositors’ required risk-premium.

This paper estimates the drop in profits and the equity shortfall triggered by the COVID-19 shock and the subsequent lockdown, using a representative sample of 80,972 Italian firms. We find that a 3-month lockdown entails an aggregate yearly drop in profits of €170 billion, with an implied equity erosion of €117 billion for the whole sample, and €31 billion for firms that became distressed, i.e., ended up with negative book value after the shock. As a consequence of these losses, about 17% of the sample firms, whose employees account for 8.8% of total employment in the sample (about 800 thousand employees), become distressed. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are affected disproportionately, with 18.1% of small firms, and 14.3% of medium-sized ones becoming distressed, against 6.4% of large firms. The equity shortfall and the extent of distress are concentrated in the Manufacturing and Wholesale Trading sectors and in the North of Italy. Since many firms predicted to become distressed due to the shock had fragile balance sheets even prior to the COVID-19 shock, restoring their equity to their pre-crisis levels may not suffice to ensure their long-term solvency.

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.