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'Banking deregulation and households' consumption behaviour. The case of Italy in the early 90's'.

   This paper evaluates whether Italian banking deregulation in the early 1990s has affected households' consumption insurance. The ‘Survey of households’ income and wealth’ (SHIW) from the Bank of Italy is used to exploit the high degree of heterogeneity among them. I study whether structural banking reforms aiming at privatising the banking sector, eliminating the regulatory constraints on branching and reintroducing the `universal banks' have changed the consumption's response to unanticipated income shocks of households, in a setting of `partial insurance model'. Results point out that structural changes within the banking sector, as a result of deregulation, have positively affected the ability of households to insure against unanticipated permanent income shocks, while no significant changes have been found with respect to transitory ones. This works also contributes by identifying the main channels of transmission via which the banking deregulation has affected households'insurance.

'Income inequality and financial development: a multidimensional approach. Evidence from panel data.'

This work investigates the link between income inequality and financial development, by studying a heterogenous sample of countries between 1960 and 2014. Three main dimensions are tested: the structure (banking versus stock market systems), the depth (amount of aggregate credit lent to private sector and also disaggregated between households and firms) and the efficiency (lending-deposit spread). We also test whether the level of economic development and the real economy  structure may interfere with the way financial development does a¤ect income inequality. Both the static fixed effect and the dynamic GMM estimator apply to our sample. Results of this work suggests that i) banking indicators tend to be associated with higher level of inequality, while stock market systems are found to enhance a more egalitarian income distribution; ii) a U-shaped pattern is depicted in data when the depth dimension is tested, suggesting that .too much credit is pro-inequality; iii) who gets the credit matters; iv) higher levels of spread are found to be positively linked to inequality. With respect to the interactions tested in the model, v) as an economy develops, finance tends to exacerbate the level of inequality; iv) the real structure and the financial structure appear to exert a joint effect on income inequality.

'Competition Law and Income Inequality: A Panel Data Econometric Approach' (co-authored with Amit Zac, Christopher Drecker and Ariel Ezrachi)