Il presente lavoro analizza le metodologie di attribuzione dei rating delle principali agenzie internazionali (Moody’s, Fitch e Standard & Poor’s) per un campione di banche italiane ed europee quotate tra il 2005 e il 2010 e verifica empiricamente, attraverso un’analisi multivariata di tipo Ols, le possibili relazioni di dipendenza tra i rating e gli indicatori di bilancio delle banche medesime e alcune variabili macroeconomiche e di mercato. L’analisi empirica condotta sembra supportare la tesi secondo cui le agenzie di rating tengono mediamente conto e in misura statisticamente significativa, sebbene con delle interessanti divergenze, delle dinamiche delle variabili di bilancio, macroeconomiche e di fiducia considerate nel presente lavoro.

A partire dagli inizi degli anni Novanta, i paesi facenti parte dell’UE hanno manifestato un interesse crescente allo sviluppo e all’utilizzazione di energia da fonti rinnovabili, sia per ragioni ambientali che per gli interessanti risvolti economici del settore nel suo complesso. Obiettivo del presente lavoro è quello di evidenziare le peculiarità del comparto delle energie rinnovabili, con particolare attenzione alle imprese operanti nel settore, alle problematiche connesse con la loro valutazione, alle modalità di accesso al mercato dei capitali, alle loro performance e al ruolo svolto dagli intermediari finanziari in tale contesto. A tal fine, il lavoro si suddivide in quattro capitoli. Nel primo capitolo si delineano le principali caratteristiche del comparto delle energie rinnovabili analizzando le nuove regole a livello comunitario, nazionale ed internazionale. Nel secondo capitolo si evidenzia il ruolo degli intermediari finanziari in particolare nella fase di implementazione del business plan per l’avvio dell’attività delle imprese attive in tale comparto. Nel terzo capitolo vengono presentati alcuni casi pratici di costituzione di impianti a fonti rinnovabili nel settore eolico, la fonte principale del territorio pugliese, con prospetti sintetici di analisi dei costi e valutazione dei ricavi realizzati con l’ausilio di intermediari finanziari. Nel quarto capitolo si presentano le principali società che operano nel campo delle energie rinnovabili e che sono attualmente quotate nel mercato regolamentato di Borsa Italiana SpA. Si evidenziano pertanto le aree di business, le performance, le quotazioni e gli andamenti dei titoli nel corso degli ultimi anni.

The new regulations of banking compensation following the sub-prime crisis require that incentive plans must be linked not only to performance parameters, but also to non-financial or qualitative metrics linked to social value produced by banks. This paper aims to analyze this issue by developing a qualitative rating to be used not only to investigate the spread and the diversification of such qualitative indicators, but also to analyze the best practices by banks. At a methodological level, the content analysis approach is adopted. The sample covers all of the “European globally systemically important institutions” (G-SIIs), while the investigation period regards the three-years 2014-2016. The main results are encouraging as they show a good diffusion of qualitative metrics by bank incentive plans; however, the intensity of use, synthesized by the “ESG-remuneration performance score”, is still inadequate. Moreover, the analysis reveal other criticalities linked to the implementation of the balance scorecard and the use of measurement tools in order to quantify the qualitative metrics correctly.

This research provides an insight to the main determinants behind the systematic risk of banks. For this purpose, we use a number of regression models to test the statistical significance of a wide range of bank-specific risk factors. The results indicate that bank equity beta correlates positively with bank size and with the relative volume of loans and intangible assets, and negatively with bank profitability, liquidity levels and loan loss provisions. We find no evidence supporting the traditional hypothesis that lower leveraged banks may be exposed to lower systematic risk. The study refers to the Italian banking system. Our findings are of significance both to bank managers as well as investors, since they will enable them to fully assess the effects of different strategic choices on a bank’s risk profile. We also discuss potential policy implications regarding the impact of the new capital requirements imposed by Basel III in light of the observed risk-leverage relationship.

The purpose of this book is to study - theoretically and empirically - the determinants of stock prices of European banks during a financial crisis. The research is based on the idea that banks' stock prices in a period of market uncertainty and turmoil reflect the dynamics of budget indicators, market and macroeconomic variables, as well as the dynamics outside the core business and systemic variables. This in the dual awareness of the following: - international financial markets show considerable divergence between the market values of listed companies and the related capital stock estimates each day, which should reflect the expected profitability and degree of risk of the individual enterprise; - such differences of value originate, in part, from essentially economic and systemic factors and are therefore not directly governable by management or by motivational factors of an essentially emotional matrix and are therefore of an ephemeral and short-lived nature. The prices at which securities are traded reflect, at any moment, the judgement of the same on the potential of future income and the level of risk of the individual enterprise. The possible divergence between the stock market estimate and the one derived from the accounting data highlights the presence of business variables other than the reading of corporate financial statements but viewed and valued - positively or negatively - by the market. In addition to the effects of the alternatives of the business cycle, the significant inconsistencies between the market value and the economic value of the capital of listed companies, therefore, reflect market perceptions about a company's economic outlook over a given time horizon. In this study, an epistemological approach to the theme of constructivist, inductive and market-centric inquiry is adopted. This is intended to conclude a merely theoretical and deductive analysis with an inductive test of the emerging data from the empirical analysis of the banking realities analysed. In fact, this work is divided into two parts: - a first part that is essentially theoretical, consisting of the first two chapters, which aims to address the issue of creating and disseminating economic value in the specificity of financial intermediaries as well as the formation of banks' share prices between expectations and risk; - a second part that is essentially empirical, consisting of the last chapter, which illustrates the findings of an empirical investigation conducted on a panel of listed European banks aiming to analyse the sensitivity of stock prices of the banks compared to the variations of the budget indicators, as well as external and market variables, during a period of financial crisis.