Credit availability and investment in Italy: lessons from the "Great Recession"

Eugenio Gaiotti

No 793, Temi di discussione (Economic working papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area

Abstract: The paper argues that the traditional difficulty encountered in finding evidence on the effects of credit availability on economic activity depends on the fact that these effects are powerful but rare and vary with the cycle. The global financial crisis offers an opportunity to test this assumption. The paper exploits a unique dataset, including direct information on credit rationing for 1,200 Italian firms over the last twenty years. We find that the elasticity of a firmï¿½s investment to the availability of bank credit has been significant in periods of economic contraction, but not in other periods; that the ability to tap alternative sources of finance is crucial to this result; that during the global crisis the impact of credit constraints on Italian investment in manufacturing was significant.

Keywords: credit availability; credit channel; Great Recession (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E22 E44 E51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban and nep-mac
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bdi:wptemi:td_793_11

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