Anti-mafia law enforcement and lending in mafia lands. Evidence from judicial administration in Italy

The paper analyses the impact of a preventive measure aimed at fighting the criminal organizations’ activities on the bank-firm relationship in the four Italian regions with the highest density of mafia over the period 2004–2016. Taking advantage of the staggered firm-level anti-mafia enforcement actions, we implement a difference-in-differences approach and find that after entering judicial administration mafia-infiltrated firms experience a 19 per cent contraction of bank credit and have a higher probability of being credit rationed than a matched sample of legal companies. We also find that firms confiscated from the mafia experience a negative change in some demand-driven (value of production) and supply-driven (profitability) determinants of loans. Finally, we study whether confiscation of infiltrated firms produces externalities on non-infiltrated companies, and show that banks do not reassess the overall credit risk in local markets.