No. 26 - A Quantitative Look at the Italian Banking System: Evidence from a New Dataset since 1861.

Building on a new dataset on Italian banks and other financial institutions from 1861 to 2011, the novelty of this paper is to examine the patterns of the main items of bank's balance sheets, such as deposits, capital and reserves, bonds issued, bonds held in portfolio, and loans for a period of 150 years. The long time behaviour of credit maturity, postal savings, State ownership of banks, and bank interest rates is also studied.