Is Financial Fragility a Matter of Illiquidity? An Appraisal for Italian Households

We investigate household financial fragility in Italy, providing three main contributions. First, we propose a novel characterization of financial fragility that is not necessarily linked to indebtedness, distinguishes between expected and unexpected expenses, takes portfolio composition into account, and is free of subjectivity bias. Second, we use it to assess the importance of household portfolio composition for determining the difficulties related to coping with unexpected expenditures, besides socio‐economic and demographic factors. Third, we test its ability to forecast future conditions of financial distress. The empirical analysis is based on the Bank of Italy Survey on Household Income and Wealth. The results highlight the relevance of portfolio choices as determinants of financial distress, that is, they provide evidence that homeownership increases the likelihood of financial fragility while the presence of a mortgage decreases it. Moreover our measure is shown to act as an early warning indicator of distress.     

Linking Small‐Scale Commercial Activities and Women's Health: The Jamu System in Urban Areas of Java,Indonesia

Traditional medicine practices are widely documented and analyzed in Asia. Despite this, the interlinkages existing between small‐scale commercial activities based on ethnomedicine and local health have been ignored. This paper attempts to overcome this shortcoming by analyzing the possible synergies existing between small‐scale commercial activities centered on traditional herbal medicine in Indonesia (jamu) and health. The paper shows how the existence of these links in the city of Yogyakarta, Java, could represent a valuable basis to increment primary health care and enhance local livelihoods of rural women through commercial activities in the herbal sector.     

Marriage and other risky assets: A portfolio approach

We study the joint impact of gender and marital status on financial investments by testing the hypothesis that marriage represents – in a portfolio framework – a sort of safe asset and that this attribute may change over time. We show that married individuals have a higher propensity to invest in risky assets than single ones, that this marital status gap is stronger for women and that, for women only, it evolves and declines at the end of the sample period. Next we explore a number of possible explanations of the observed gender differences by controlling for background factors that capture the evolution of family and society. We find that both the higher female marital status gap and its time variability vanish for those women who are employed. Our empirical investigation is based on a dataset drawn from the 1993–2006 Bank of Italy Survey of Household Income and Wealth.     

Modelling Credit Risk for Innovative SMEs: the Role of Innovation Measures

Small-medium enterprises (SMEs) encounter financial constraints when they try to obtain credit from banks. These constraints are particularly severe for innovative SMEs. Thus, developing models for innovative SMEs that provide reliable estimates of their probabilities of default (PD) is important because the PDs can also serve as ratings. We examine the role of innovative assets such as patents in credit risk modelling due to their signaling value. Specifically, we add to a logit model two innovation-related variables in order to account for both the dimension and the value of the patent portfolio. Based on a unique data set of innovative SMEs with default years of 2005–2008, we show that, although the value of the patent portfolio always reduces the PD, its dimension reduces the firm’s riskiness only if coupled with an appropriate equity level.     

The information in the term structure of German interest rates

This paper tests the Expectations Hypothesis (EH) of the term structure of interest rates using new data for Germany. The German term structure appears to forecast future short-term interest rates surprisingly well, compared with previous studies with US data, while it has lower predictive power for long-term interest rates. However, the direction suggested by the coefficient estimates is consistent with that implied by the EH, that is when the term spread widens, long rates increase. The use of instrumental variables to deal with possible measurement errors in the data significantly improves regressions for the long rates. Moreover, re-estimation with proxy variables to account for the possibility of time-varying term premia confirms that the evolution of both short and long rates corresponds to the predictions of the EH and that most of the information is in the term spread. These results are important as they suggest that monetary policy in Germany could be guided by the slope of the term structure.     

Managerial Incentives and the Choice between Public and Bank Debt

I propose a simple model with complete and perfect information on the relation between managerial incentive compensation and choice between public and bank debt. The empirical analysis offers considerable support to the model's predictions. I find that managers whose compensation is tied to firm performance prefer bank to public debt. Further, I find a positive relation between cost of public debt and managerial incentive compensation and no relation between loan spreads and incentive compensation. Finally, I find that banks are more likely to include a collateral provision in the debt contract if the CEO's compensation is tied to firm performance.     

The role of hedge funds as primary lenders

We examine the role of hedge funds as primary lenders to corporate firms. We investigate both the reasons and the implications of hedge funds’ activities in the primary loan market. We examine the characteristics of firms that borrow from hedge funds and find that borrowers are primarily firms with lower profitability, lesser credit quality, and higher asymmetric information. Our results suggest that hedge funds serve as lenders of last resort to firms that may find it difficult to borrow from banks or issue public debt. We also examine the effect of hedge fund lending on the borrowing firms and find that borrowers’ profitability and creditworthiness improve subsequent to the loan. This beneficial effect of hedge fund lending is corroborated by our finding of positive abnormal returns for borrowers’ stocks around the loan announcement date. Overall, our findings are consistent with hedge funds adding value through their lending relationships and financial markets perceiving these activities as good news for the firms.     

The rational expectation dynamics of a model for the term structure and monetary policy

Decisions in Economics and Finance - We describe in this paper a variance reduction method based on control variates. The technique uses the fact that, if all stochastic assets but one are replaced...