VENICE - The fundamental question emerging from one of the most attractive Panel Sessions at the two day FMA (Financial Management Association) Annual Meeting hosted by Ca' Foscari University of Venice, was whether Basel is the right gateway to a more efficient debt market.

  Discussions started from the latest empirical results of "Integrated Rating", the applied research program aiming to promote a more effective rating system for credit allowances and SME finance.

  Launched in 2013, as a joint program between the Chamber of Commerce in Treviso and the Ca' Foscari University Campus in the same town, its prototype is now ready for the forthcoming spin-off. After the academic awards received in New Orleans and Los Angeles, the project is now also ready to release some useful support to policy makers in Europe, since its results are now based on the analysis of the financial reports from 101,557 companies for the period 2006-2012, in ten countries (USA, UK, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia).

  "The empirical evidence is clear: the marginal productivity of the bulk Basel-based regulation is decreasing" says the academic director of the project, Prof. Guido Mantovani from Ca' Foscari University in Venice and HERMES-Universities in Strasbourg, and chair of the FMA Conference this year.

  "Low Basel intensive Countries – like the Anglo Saxon ones – are more allocative since they miss less funding opportunities (less than 10% vs. more than 20%) and have lower risk of default (23% vs. 35%)," he concludes.

  The project is getting more and more international as demonstrated by the two upstanding discussants during the panel session. For Prof. Andrea Moro from Cranfield University (UK) and this years visiting professor at Ca' Foscari for corporate banking, "the results from the research are due to the inefficiency of Justice, particularly in Europe".

  Prof. Hans-Peter Burghof, the well-known German opinion leader teaching banking at Hoenheim Universitaet in Stuttgart, remarked that "some of the problems reside in the way the financial innovation relates to the regulations and the Regulators".

  "Integrated rating results clearly demonstrate that a competing market for equity is disciplining the market for debt more than heavy regulation" according to Nicola Tognana, the chair of the Chamber of Commerce in Treviso, which strongly supported the research program from the very beginning.

  Tognana accepted to participate the panel session since "it's time that results from this internationally awarded research are to be used even for better policies at European level."

  More than 300 people worldwide registered for this record conference. It can be deemed a true success with a rich program of more than 80 academic sessions, presenting the best 240 research papers. These papers were selected from 500 submissions by a team chaired by Guido Mantovani from Ca' Foscari along with prof. Giampaolo Gabbi (SDA Bocconi), Lillian Ng (University of Toronto), Jack Rader (University of South Florida) and Michelle Lui (FMA director).

  The conference reflects two years of intensive work which states the academic reputation of the entire School of Finance of Ca' Foscari University, strongly represented by prof. Giorgio Bertinetti and Loriana Pelizzon in the Scientific Board supporting the Conference.

  The conference was staffed by P-GrecoT, the brotherhood of Ca' Foscari under the direction of Katia Soccal (fellow researcher working of the HERMES-Universities Network in the Ca' Foscari Campus in Treviso).