Stefano Miani’s research while affiliated with University of Udine and other places

The massive stock of Non-Performing Loans (NPLs) in Europe has forced regulatory and supervisory authorities to promote debate on their management and timely disposal. Simultaneously, the transition to IFRS 9 created the need for higher provisioning and for weighting sale scenarios in the assessment of NPLs. This study, using a scenario analysis based on the Italian experience of the NPL resolution process, focuses on the cost of deleveraging by comparing the alternative strategies of direct sale and securitization. The study highlights the impact of the assumptions derived from the portfolio assessment and the additional cost arising from the uncertainties surrounding the appropriate recovery procedure. It demonstrates that securitization minimises this cost, while estimating the benefit derived from the support of State-backed guarantees. These findings provide useful insights for policy makers, suggesting the promotion of further measures that aim to reduce the transfer of value from banks to third parties.

Publicly owned private‐law organizations represent a sort of a hybrid between pure‐public and pure‐private management forms, and a rather successful one, at least if one considers the ongoing success that such organizations encounter in many European countries, especially at the local level. Economic theory has devoted scant attention to the reasons that may confer a competitive advantage to public enterprises, vis‐à‐vis both entirely privatized companies and traditional public bureaucracies. The paper develops a conceptual framework to systematically evaluate the performances of local SoEs in relation to their ability to achieve policy goals. By considering SoEs as output‐maximizing organizations rather than profit‐maximizing ones, the proposed approach entails an interactive dialogue between evaluators, policymakers and managers to deliver better evaluation outcomes. The methodology is applied to assess the performance of a sample of local SoEs owned by the Region Friuli Venezia Giulia in Italy in an effort to support policymakers in deciding whether to maintain its shareholding participations or divest them, that is, privatizing the public services involved.

This paper focuses on the risk-return profile of the asset-backed securities deriving from the securitization of non-performing loans (NPLs). We test several hypotheses concerning the portfolio sell price, tranche note size and use of a public guarantee supporting the senior notes. We observe the return distribution of junior notes as a function of the portfolio recovery rate, assuming a lognormal distribution. Moreover, we focus on the probability of achieving selected target returns using a value-at-risk approach. Our results provide evidence that securitization is the most valuable deleveraging strategy from the perspective of both investors and banks.