Dipartimento di Comunicazione e Economia

Today, banks are fully aware that the global financial crisis has had a negative impact on consumer trust in financial intermediaries. In the present scenario, successful companies gain a competitive advantage through increased efficiency, high quality of service, and improved customer relations. Several arguments are currently encouraging banks to increasingly adopt strategies of customer retention and customer loyalty. These arguments are based on a very simple fact: the costs incurred in avoiding the loss of old customers are clearly much lower than those required to acquire new customers. Moreover, keeping customers satisfied is currently both

BANCARIA 1. Il premio Nobel Alfred Nobel, il suo testamento e la Fondazione Nobel. Il Premio Nobel esiste per merito di Alfred Ber-Il Premio Nobel e il Premio Nobel per l'Economia Il Premio Nobel esiste per merito di Alfred Bernhard Nobel, chimico e imprenditore svedese, che nel suo testamento decise di destinare il suo patrimonio a cinque premi, da attribuire ogni anno, a diversi ambiti disciplinari: fisica, chimica, medicina, letteratura e pace. Il testamento non contemplava la presenza di un premio Nobel all'Economia, che giunse solo a partire dal 1969 quando la Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, su proposta della Banca centrale di Svezia, decise di istituirlo, di finanziarlo e divenne responsabile del processo di selezione dei candidati. In questi 50 anni, a partire dal 1969 e sino al 2018, con la scelta di Nordhaus e Romer, 81 studiosi sono stati insigniti dal premio Nobel per le Scienze Economiche. Questo articolo, che rappresenta la prima parte di un lavoro di ricerca più ampio, spiega i fatti, le regole e le curiosità relativi al Premio Nobel e alla sua origine, illustrando anche la nascita, nonché gli studiosi premiati, del premio Nobel in Scienze Economiche. The Nobel Prize exists thanks to Alfred Bernhard Nobel, a Swedish chemist and entrepreneur, who in his will decided to allocate his legacy to five grants, to be awarded each year, to different fields: physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace. The will did not contemplate the presence of a Nobel Prize for Economics, which only came in 1969 when the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences decided to establish it, to finance it, and became responsible for the selection process of candidates. In these 50 years, starting from 1969 and until 2018, with the award to Nordhaus and Romer, 81 Laureates have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. This article, which represents the first part of a much broader analysis, explains facts, rules and curiosities related to the Nobel Prize and its origin, while illustrating the birth, as well as awarded Laureates, of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.

The 2012 earthquake in Emilia-Romagna (Italy) has shaken up the collective understanding on the socioeconomic importance of a vast territory that generates almost 2% of Italian GDP. The area affected by the earthquake is characterized by the presence of important industrial and agricultural districts, and by good practices of local governance that are internationally renowned. Private and public buildings, factories, offices and retail shops, historical and cultural heritage sites have been severely damaged. Not only, but it set in motion transformations in the socio-economic system that might have unexpected consequences and that undermine the quick recovery of the local system: different agents, at different levels, taking individual and collective decisions, generate a cascade of changes that interact with its evolution path. Indeed, earthquakes pose challenges, but provide unprecedented opportunities: strategic decisions by economic and political agents, newly available financia...

In many countries, Banking Authorities have adopted an Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) procedure to manage complaints that customers and financial intermediaries cannot solve by themselves. As a consequence, banks have had to implement complaint management systems in order to deal with customers' demands. The growth rate of customer complaints has been increasing during the last few years. This does not seem to be only related to the quality of financial services or to lack of compliance in banking products. Another reason lies in the characteristics of the procedures themselves, which are very simple and free of charge. The paper analyzes some determinants regarding the willingness to complain. In particular, it examines whether a high customers' probability of default leads to an increase in non-valid complaints. The paper uses a sample of approximately 1,000 customers who received a loan and made a claim against the lender. The analysis shows that customers with higher Probability of Default are more likely to make claims against Financial Institutions. Moreover, it shows that opportunistic behaviors and non-valid complaints are more likely if the customer is supported by a lawyer or other professionals and if the reason for the claim may result in a refund or damage compensation.

Investment decisions are very difficult because they involve money and can impact our quality of life. According to the axioms of rationality, different but equivalent information formats should not affect investment strategies. The authors perform two experiments here, and find evidence of a strong absolute magnitude effect on investment decisions. In Experiment 1, participants (students) chose to sell a losing fund more often when returns were expressed as a percentage of variation between the buying value and the actual value (e.g., 24%) than when they were expressed as a monetary difference between the buying price and the actual price (e.g., $0.24). In the context of the experiment, the percentage format decreased the disposition effect significantly. Furthermore, describing the stock returns as ratios (e.g., ¼) increased the tendency toward the status quo bias. In Experiment 2, the authors showed that the absolute magnitude of the numbers shaped participants' satisfaction with fund returns, and was responsible for the different choices of investment strategies.

The risk-return trade off: Expected and required return Abstract Traditional economic models state that riskier investments should have a higher expected return. Psychological models of choice showed that people is influenced by the kind of information they are provided with and by the context of the choice, since they do not have a stable order of preferences but, rather, they construct it while giving a judgment. Experiment 1 showed that people consider the expected return of an equity only when it is explicitly stated, rather than computing it on the basis of the expected outcomes and probabilities. Experiment 2 and 3 showed that people judgments about the expected return of a stock are influenced by the way they are required to provide their estimates. In Experiment 2 participants' judgments were inconsistent with the risk-return trade off, whereas in Experiment 3 people asked a higher return from a riskier stock than from a safer one. Implications of the results for investors' behavior are discussed.

Investment decisions are very difficult because they involve money and can impact our quality of life. According to the axioms of rationality, different but equivalent informa-tion formats should not affect investment strategies. The authors perform two experi-ments here, and find evidence of a strong absolute magnitude effect on investment de-cisions. In Experiment 1, participants (students) chose to sell a losing fund more often when returns were expressed as a percentage of variation between the buying value and the actual value (e.g., 24%) than when they were expressed as a monetary differ-ence between the buying price and the actual price (e.g., $0.24). In the context of the experiment, the percentage format decreased the disposition effect significantly. Fur-thermore, describing the stock returns as ratios (e.g., ¼) increased the tendency to-ward the status quo bias. In Experiment 2, the authors showed that the absolute mag-nitude of the numbers shaped participants' satisf...

Traditional economic models state that riskier investments should have a higher expected return. Psychological models of choice showed that people is influenced by the kind of information they are provided with and by the context of the choice, since they do not have a stable order of preferences but, rather, they construct it while giving a judgment. Experiment 1 showed that people consider the expected return of an equity only when it is explicitly stated, rather than computing it on the basis of the expected outcomes and probabilities. Experiment 2 and 3 showed that people judgments about the expected return of a stock are influenced by the way they are required to provide their estimates. In Experiment 2 participants' judgments were inconsistent with the risk-return trade off, whereas in Experiment 3 people asked a higher return from a riskier stock than from a safer one. Implications of the results for investors' behavior are discussed.

In this paper we present a study on small firm creditworthiness evaluation in bank lending using a fuzzy approach. The approach is based on the fuzzy expert systems techniques 1 , in which the bank involved has furnished data and their leading experts in the sector. Real data of an Italian Bank are used to demonstrate the applicability and the efficiency of the proposed method. 1 The fuzzy system is built with the support of the software "fuzzyTECH" by INFORM

Our paper offers evidence that the print media can affect stock prices by covering public information. After price-to-book value figures of Italian listed shares were first published on the major national financial newspaper, the prices of value stocks did, on average, show a positive reaction. The price reaction was limited to small caps stocks and disappeared within three weeks. Over the period of analysis, we could not find any abnormal behaviour of the returns of small and value stocks on other European markets. These findings support the view that newspapers play a role in disseminating information to small investors and grabbing their attention, even if news are continuously realeased by faster and more sophisticated media.

This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. Highlights • We test the behavioral versus the rational model of advertising in financial markets. • Granger causality between the number of ads and the stock is used to test whether advertisements precede or follow the stock index. • We separate risky and non-risky products advertising and find that risky products ads follow the stock index while non-risky products are unrelated to the stock index. • The behavioral model of advertising applies for risky products ads while the rational model applies for non risky products ads: the two models are complementary rather than alternative.

This study analyzes the effectiveness of the Market Abuse Directive (MAD) in reducing possible profits from insider trading during voluntary tender offers with the purpose of delisting initiated by controlling shareholders. Exploiting the quasi-experimental setting provided by the introduction of the MAD, our event-study analysis on the Italian market suggests that the new regulation did not produce appreciable effects on the magnitude of abnormal returns and volumes noted before the announcement of a tender offer. Multivariate econometric analyses based on regression and matching methods confirm this result. However, poolability tests reveal that the MAD has changed the manner in which corporate characteristics influence the capacity of insiders to make profit. We interpret our results considering the choice problem of the optimal amount of insider trading, when comparing the marginal costs and benefits of the illegal activity.

In the years since the outbreak of the crisis, financial markets have persistently reduced the market value of European banks, as consequence of macroeconomic, regulatory and structural factors. Even if these factors affected the whole European banking industry, differences characterized market evaluation of banks along country, size and business mix profiles. Following the extant literature on bank market valuation, our paper tests for the difference between market to book ratios of the large European banks, using three blocks of indicators typically affecting the banks’ market value. To verify our research question, we first regress the market to book ratio over performance measures and risk indicators. Then, we verify whether bank business size and composition affect bank market valuation. Lastly we evaluate the relevance of country context variables, by considering both macroeconomic and banking structure indicators. Our panel consists of all large publicly traded bank holding c...

The focus of this paper is to understand whether the words contained in a text corpus improves the explained variance of stock returns better than the use of the polarity of the same texts, obtained through a sentiment analysis using a generic ontological dictionary. The empirical analysis is based on the content of a weekly column in the most important Italian financial newspaper, which published past information and analysts’ recommendations on listed companies. The use of textual data clearly increases the explained variance of stock returns but, through comparisons between data mining techniques, we observed minor differences in terms of MSE, by adding a selection of specific terms as features. In this context, the text mining approach proved to be very useful to improve the explanatory power of forecasting models, while it emerged the limited explanatory power of an automatic sentiment analysis based on a generic lexicon. Abstract Il focus di questo contributo è capire se le pa...

This paper deals with a long standing issue in finance: weather the market reaction to second-hand information is due to price pressure or dissemination. We take an attention-grabbing perspective as a particular form of price pressure in analysing the market reaction to the dissemination of analysts’ recommendations through the press. This perspective allows predicting an asymmetric market reaction to “buy ” and “sell ” advises, already detected in few other empirical studies, otherwise difficult to rationalize within the standard price pressure hypothesis. In particular, we analyse the content of a column that appears weekly in the most important Italian financial newspaper and presents past information and analysts ’ recommendations on listed companies, finding an asymmetric price and volume reaction. Contrary to previous evidence, we document a positive relation between the number of analysts quoted in the column and the price (volume) increase associated to positive recommendati...

We present a test of the behavioral versus the rational model of advertising in the financial market. We analyze the Granger-causality relationship existing between Comit stock market index and advertising of financial products and services from the most important daily published financial newspaper in Italy. We run the test for both the risky and non-risky advertising, finding that the behavioral model of advertising is supported when risky financial products and services are considered, while the rational model is true for the non-risky. We ascribe this result to the dual process of reasoning: When investors evaluate the decision to buy risky financial products and services, they activate the automatic, rapid decision making process. The behavioral model of advertising copes with it and provides an advertising strategy that responds to market evolutions. When non-risky financial products and services are considered, a different mental process, requiring slow and sequential reasoning, operates, compatibly with a rational decision making process.