In this paper we study the relevance of the gender of the contracting parties involved in lending. We show that female entrepreneurs face tighter access to credit, even though they do not pay higher interest rates. The effect is independent of the information available about the borrower and holds if we control for unobservable individual effects. The gender of the loan officer is also important: we find that female officers are more risk-averse or less self-confident than male officers as they tend to restrict credit availability to new, unestablished borrowers more than their male counterparts. JEL Classification: G21; G32; J16

No abstract

No abstract

This paper offers a methodological contribution to the empirical analysis of the relationship between banking and economic growth by suggesting a new indicator for the state of development of the banking system based on a measure of bank microeconomic efficiency. This choice helps to overcome the problem of causality and to capture the effects of banks' activity on growth. This new approach is then applied to analyse the relationship between the banking system and economic growth in the Italian regions, through a dynamic panel technique. The empirical results show the existence of an independent effect exerted by the efficiency of banks on regional growth.

In a recent study, Chami et al. (2003) suggested that remittances can have a negative impact on economic growth of the receiving country by diminishing the work effort of the migrants' relatives.Subsequently, Giuliano and Ruiz-Arranz (2009) found that this moral hazard effect emerges only when financial development is low. In this paper, we introduce a new indicator of financial development measuring the efficiency domestic banking system and show that the impact of remittances on economic growth is negative (positive) in countries where bank efficiency is low (high). This complementarity result is robust to controls for other financial development and institutional quality indicators.

Using detailed data on loan applications and decisions for a large sample of manufacturing firms in Italy during the recent financial crisis, we find that the credit crunch has been harsher in provinces with a large share of branches owned by distantly managed banks. Inconsistent with a flight to quality we do not find evidence that economically weaker firms suffered more during the crisis. In contrast, we find that financially healthier firms were affected more in functionally distant credit markets than in markets populated by less distant banks, consistent with a home bias on the part of nationwide banks.JEL codes: F33, F34, F35, O11

In this paper we study the relevance of the gender of the contracting parties involved in lending. We show that female entrepreneurs face tighter access to credit, even though they do not pay higher interest rates. The effect is independent of the information available about the borrower and holds if we control for unobservable individual effects. The gender of the loan officer is also important: we find that female officers are more risk-averse or less self-confident than male officers as they tend to restrict credit availability to new, unestablished borrowers more than their male counterparts. JEL Classification: G21; G32; J16

Recent studies indicate that the effect of migrants' remittances on the economic growth of receiving countries depends negatively on the level of development of the domestic financial sector. In this paper, we introduce a new indicator of financial development to measure the efficiency of the domestic banking system, and find the existence of complementarity between remittances and bank efficiency in economic growth, such that remittances promote growth only in countries whose banks function well. This result is robust to controls for other traditional measures of financial depth and institutional quality indicators.