Research
with Andrea Passalacqua, Paolo Angelini and Giovanni Soggia , "The Real Effect of Banking Supervision" (November 2019)
Using a novel confidential supervisory dataset, we find that on-site inspections trigger a more accurate assessment of a bank’s assets quality: credits are reclassified from performing to nonperforming, and additional write-offs on impaired credit positions. A temporary negative shock on inspected banks’ lending activity follows. However, the latter is driven by a fall in credit to ailing firms, only partially offset by an increase in lending towards more productive firms or new ventures. As a results, these productive firms increase employment and invest more in fixed capital. Looking at the local economy, we find positive spillovers from bank inspections that result in an increase in entrepreneurship and firm dynamics, with ailing firms more likely to exit the market.
Do political connections affect firm dynamics, innovation, and creative destruction? We study Italian firms and their workers to answer this question. Our analysis uses a brand-new dataset, spanning the period from 1993 to 2014, where we merge: (i) firm-level balance sheet data; (ii) social security data on the universe of workers; (iii) patent data from the European Patent Office; (iv) the national registry of local politicians; and (v) detailed data on local elections in Italy. We find that firm-level political connections are widespread, especially among large firms, and that industries with a larger share of politically connected firms feature worse firm dynamics. We identify a leadership paradox: When compared to their competitors, market leaders are much more likely to be politically connected, but much less likely to innovate. In addition, political connections relate to a higher rate of survival, as well as growth in employment and revenue, but not in productivity – a result that we also confirm using a regression discontinuity design. We build a firm dynamics model, where we allow firms to invest in innovation and/or political connection to advance their productivity and to overcome certain market frictions. Our model highlights a new interaction between static gains and dynamic losses from rent-seeking in aggregate productivity.
Dec 2019