Fading Investment Banking? Italy Before the Second World War

Investment banking; Fnancial innovation; institutions and regulation; Italy

International Portfolio Formation, Skewness & the Role of Gold

This paper examines the optimal allocation of assets in well diversified equity based portfolio where the investor is concerned not only with mean and variance but also with the skewness of the returns. Beginning with an analysis of the rationale for concerning with skewness, the paper then discusses previous attempts to model multi-objective portfolio problems. The second part of the paper outlines the attractive nature of the gold asset in equity portfolios. The paper then integrates the two elements, showing the changes in portfolio composition that arise when not only skewness but gold are concerned.Portfolio Allocation, Skewness, Gold

Bank Ownership and Lending Behavior

This paper examines whether bank ownership (public versus private, domestic versus foreign) is correlated with bank lending behavior over the business cycle. The paper finds that state-owned banks may play a useful credit-smoothing role because their lending is less responsive to macroeconomic shocks than the lending of private banks. The paper investigates whether this differential behavior is due to an explicit objective of stabilizing credit or to the presence of "lazy" public bank managers; evidence is found in support of the former hypothesis. In the case of foreign-owned banks, the paper finds that the results are less clear-cut and argues that this finding is in line with existing theoretical models.

Bank Ownership and Lending Behavior

This paper checks whether state-ownership of banks is correlated with lending behavior over the business cycle and finds that their lending is less responsive to macroeconomic shocks than the lending of private banks.

Special Libraries, September 1976

Volume 67, Issue 9https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1976/1007/thumbnail.jp

Bank Ownership and Performance Does Politics Matter?

This paper uses a new dataset to reassess the relationship between bank ownership and bank performance, providing separate estimations for developing and industrial countries. It finds that state-owned banks located in developing countries tend to have lower profitability and higher costs than their private counterparts, and that the opposite is true for foreign-owned banks. The paper finds no strong correlation between ownership and performance for banks located in industrial countries. Next, in order to test whether the differential in performance between public and private banks is driven by political considerations, the paper checks whether this differential widens during election years; it finds strong support for this hypothesis.Banking; Privatization; Ownership; Performance