Loan Loss Provisioning and Relationship Banking in Italy: Practices and Empirical Evidence

A panel of Italian banks for the period 2006-2012 is used in this paper to examine LLP main determinants. Our analysis also focuses on the determinants of the sub-components of LLP, i.e. provisions associated to Bad Loans and Impaired Loans and Bad Loans and Impaired Loans Coverage Ratio. A specific analysis for cooperative credit banks is provided. We find that Loan Loss provisioning for Italian banks seems to be driven principally by non-discretionary behavior. Economic fluctuations, according to our results, do not play a significant role, nor do signaling and income smoothing. Provisioning strategies for cooperative credit banks also seem to be affected by collateralized loans.