|| This seminar is open ONLY to EUI members ||

Join us for the next event of the 'Finance in the Tuscan Hills' seminar series, where we host Enrico Sette, Director and Deputy Head of the Firms and Regional Analysis Division at the Bank of Italy.

Enrico Sette will present his paper, co-authored with Angelo D’Andrea and Marco Pelosi, where they explore how broadband internet affects bank credit supply to non-financial firms. They rely on loan-level data from the Italian Credit Register and quasi-experimental variation in the diffusion of broadband. Their estimates include firm-time fixed effects to control for the effect of broadband on firm demand. The authors find that branches in municipalities reached by fast internet increase loan supply and reduce interest rates. Fast internet is used to acquire additional information on borrowers after loan origination, improving monitoring. This, in turn, drives credit expansion through increased branch productivity, broader geographical reach, and reduced local market concentration.

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Enrico Sette is the Director and Deputy Head of the Firms and Regional Analysis Division at the Bank of Italy and a research fellow at CEPR. His research focuses on financial intermediation and corporate finance. He has worked on the bank lending channel, on misallocation of credit, on banks’ corporate governance. His current research focuses on the effects of new technologies on lending. Enrico is co-editor of the International Journal of Central Banking.

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The FBF seminar series ‘Finance in the Tuscan Hills’ focuses on financial sector issues and aims to bring together researchers from across the EUI community, who share an interest in these subjects.