Proceedings of European Business Research Conference
Sheraton Roma, Rome, Italy, 5 - 6 September 2013, ISBN: 978-1-922069-29-0
Consumer Credit in Times of Crisis: New Evidence from Italian
Market
Valerio Pesic, Fabrizio Santoboni and Paolo Zenobi
The recent financial crisis has generated an impressive debate between
practitioners and scholars about the causes and consequences of the crisis,
as well as about the effectiveness of supervision and the overall architecture
of prudential supervision for providing the stability of international financial
system (Borio, 2008; Blundell-Wignall, Atkinson, Lee, 2008; Kirkpatrick,
2009; Acharya, Richardson, 2009). From this perspective, particularly
interesting has been considered the experience of those banking systems,
where the high level of debt achieved by families, can play a determinant
role on the availability of credit for the whole economy. More in particular,
among other issues, an increasing attention has been dedicated throughout
two main objectives for families’ loans demand, namely the request for
house’s purchase and consuming sustain (Ferrari et al, 2010). Moving from
this perspective, the present work aims to analyze the dynamics that have
affected the market of consumer credit in the aftermath of the recent
financial crisis, with particular reference to management policies and
commercial solutions adopted by leading operators in Italy. In this regard, we
proceeded in the creation of a survey, which we conducted between late
2012 and the first quarter of 2013, through a careful choice of sampling
analysis, made as of the preparation and subsequent administration of a
specific questionnaire we submitted to a selected sample of Italian credit
intermediaries. As expected, among other results, we find that the financial
crisis strongly reduced the capability of families to achieve any financing for
their purposes, even if significant differences arise from specific
characteristics of loans and customers creditworthiness.
Track: Banking
Keywords: Consumer credit, Bank Lending, Financial Crisis
JEL code : G23, G01
*Corresponding Author, Department of Management, University “La Sapienza”, Rome (Italy), Via del Castro
Laurenziano, 9 – 00161 Roma – Italy, Tel. +39 06 49766446 Fax. +39 06 4450079,
Email: valerio.pesic@uniroma1.it
Fabrizio Santoboni, PhD, Researcher of Banking and Finance, La Sapienza University, Rome, Italy,
Email: fabrizio.santoboni@uniroma1.it
Paolo Zenobi, PhD Student, Guglielmo Marconi University, Rome, Italy, Email: paolozenobi@consap.it