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This paper analyses the effects of investment in information technologies (IT) in the financial sector using micro-data from a panel of 600 Italian banks over the period 1989-2000. Stochastic cost and profit functions are estimated allowing for individual banks' displacements from the best practice frontier and for non-neutral technological change. The results show that both cost and profit frontier shifts are strongly correlated with IT capital accumulation. Banks adopting IT capital-intensive techniques are also more efficient. On the whole, over the past decade IT capital-deepening contribution to total factor productivity growth of the Italian banking industry can be estimated in a range between 1.3 and 1.8 per cent per year. (

This paper provides a direct test of banks' ability to mitigate informational asymmetries. In syndicated loans, lenders' incentive to screen borrowers ex ante and to monitor them ex post increases with the share they retain; consequently, the higher this share, the less risky the loan should be considered by investors, and the lower should be the interest rate they require. We analyze a large sample of syndicated loans arranged in over 80 countries during the nineties. We find that interest rates decrease in the share of the facility retained by the arranger. This certification effect is greater for smaller, more opaque loans where screening and monitoring are more valuable.

A vast literature has emphasized that small banks are at a comparative advantage in small business lending. In this paper, we show that apart from size, which is negatively correlated with bank specialization in small business lending, organizational characteristics affect bank loan portfolio choices. By using a unique dataset based on a recent survey of Italian banks, we find that after having controlled for bank size, a branch loan officer's authority has a key role in explaining bank specialization in small business lending. In particular, banks which delegate more decision-making power to their branch loan officers are more willing to lend to small firms than other banks. We approximate loan officers' authority by controlling for several factors which shape their incentives: loan officer turnover, the amount of money up to which they are allowed to lend autonomously, their role in loan approval and in setting loan interest rates, the kind of information (soft versus hard information) used for screening and monitoring borrowers, and the structure of their compensation schemes.JEL Classification: G21, L15, L22.