Using a panel of unlisted Italian banks over the period 2006–2018, we examine the extent to which a law that mandatorily introduced female quotas in the boards of Italian listed companies in 2012 had spillover effects on the boards of unlisted banks, which were not required to comply with the quota. Our results show that both the probability of having at least one woman on the board and the proportion of women on the boards of unlisted banks have been rising significantly after the passing of the law. These findings, which are robust to estimating different specifications and to using different estimation techniques, suggest that the quota law contributed to generating a fairer attitude towards women and, more in general, a change in social norms on gender equality. This may have, in turn, generated isomorphic pressures on unlisted banks, inducing them to mimic the board composition of their listed counterparts.
This work focuses on credit access and demand in Italian firms using the RIL dataset, a sample representative of Italian firms, for the year 2015. We investigate whether the gender of the firm’s decision-maker plays a role in requesting and obtaining a loan. Our results suggest that women are significantly less likely to ask for credit, while no significant differences in credit approval are found between the two genders. Moreover, the gender gap disappears for more educated women, as well as for firms in the north of the country.
This paper analyzes the performance of the Italian defined contribution guaranteed pension funds during the period 2008–2012 through a panel analysis. This paper is organized around three main research questions. The first one is focused on the probability of a guarantee payment in a given year. The second one deals with the determinants of the gap between actual return and minimum guaranteed yield on a yearly basis. The third one focuses on the factors affecting the weight of administrative and management costs and their relationship with the fund dimension.
The paper investigates the determinants of Italian pension funds' exposure to the domestic sovereign bonds through a panel analysis, over the time-period 2008-2014, on a sample of 70 funds and 230 investment lines. We investigate the drivers on sovereign home bias along two main explicative arrows: the familiarity theory, and the opportunity set theory. Results indicate that both factors are significant. However, from a quantitative point of view, the main determinant is the presence of restrictions in the investment mandate. The existence of a minimum guaranteed return increases on average by 11 per cent the weight of the Italian sovereign bonds on the European sovereign portfolio, while extending the investment spectrum outside Europe determines a decrease of 4.5 per cent on average. This finding suggests that exposures to the domestic-sovereign risk of Italian pension funds would probably reduce after specific mandate restrictions have loosened. Since sovereign home bias translates into concentration risk, it may weaken the soundness of the private pension pillar in case the Italian T-bonds suffer from a significant price reduction. Regulators should pay close attention to this issue to enhance the stability of the Italian pension fund industry, considering that such a large sovereign home bias could simultaneously undermine the private and public pension payments.
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