It is our pleasure to invite you to attend the 16th International Conference on Credit Risk Evaluation Designed for Institutional Targeting in finance.

The objective of the Conference is to bring together academics, practitioners and PhD students working in the area of risk management. The conference this year focuses on Interest Rates, Growth and Regulation and will provide an opportunity for participants engaged in research at the forefront of this area to discuss both the causes and implications of recent events in financial markets and may, in turn, suggest fruitful directions for future research. The Conference is the sixteenth of a series dedicated to various aspects of credit risk.

The co-sponsors of the Conference are GRETA Associati (Venice, Italy), the European Investment Fund (Luxembourg), European DataWarehouse (Frankfurt am Main) and Intesa Sanpaolo (Milan, Italy). The Conference is organised under the auspices of the Department of Economics of the University Ca’ Foscari of Venice, ABI - Italian Banking Association and European Investment Bank.

Since 2007, the financial crisis has triggered deep changes of various kinds. Central banks have experimented new monetary policies (low interest rates, quantitative easing, forward guidance...). The banking industry has had to develop new asset management strategies and to adjust its credit allocation practices in order to cope with a new environment characterized, in particular, by a prolonged period of very low risk-free returns. Alternatives and complements to commercial banking have continued their progress. Meanwhile, regulatory frameworks have been reshaped all around the world, with the introduction of new requirements or guidelines. All these changes have called for a substantial amount of research to improve the knowledge of the mechanisms at play during the crisis, to design adapted policy tools and to provide a better description of the new economic and financial environment.