The role of the banking system in the transmission of monetary disturbances is the object of a lively debate. A pattern of causality between credit and real economic activity, significantly different from the one implied by the conventional IS–LM framework, has been proposed by the ‘credit view’, mainly with macroeconomic empirical and theoretical contributions. This book, after analysing some of the main results of the credit view and, more generally, of the economics of financial markets imperfections, investigates the interactions between the real and financial sectors of the economy, with the purpose of looking inside the creditist ‘black box’ of the (possible) links between credit, financial markets and investments. Some of the issues analysed here (in particular, banks' liquidity preference, industrial firms' oligopsonistic power in the credit market and interactions between firms' investments and financial decisions) have been studied by different branches of economic research with contrasting methodologies and results, or have been almost neglected by the mainstream literature. In some cases, an attempt has been made here to compare and, when possible, find a unifying ground for the implications of several important contributions (in macroeconomics, industrial economics and finance) concerned with the interactions between the real and financial side of the economy.

The analyses contained in this book may interest researchers, postgraduate and advanced undergraduate students in monetary economics, macroeconomics, investment theory and related fields.

My interest and curiosity for the subjects examined in the present study were inspired by the course Industrial Structure and the Macroeconomy' taught by Keith Cowling in 1989–90 at the University of Warwick.