The paper looks at the characteristics of Italian non-financial firms that accessed the bond market for the first time between 2002 and 2013. The results of logit estimations indicate that first-time bond issuers are significantly larger and more frequently listed on the stock exchange than...

The paper describes the characteristics of the market for private placements and discusses the necessary conditions for their uptake in Europe. A private placement is a method of financing used mainly by medium-sized companies which, unable to access the public bond market, turn to one or more...

This paper studies the effects of differences in local administrative burdens in Italy in the years preceding a major reform that sped up firm registration procedures. Combining regulatory data from a survey on Italian provinces before the reform (costs and time to start a business) with...

The Italian economy has suffered from structural problems for the last fifteen years, which have weakened its competitiveness. The innovation gap, by international standards, is one of those problems. Business incubators are one of the solutions proposed in the economic literature and put into...

This paper assesses the effectiveness of Law 215/1992, an incentive scheme intended to boost female entrepreneurship in Italy. Under the law, which was only implemented in 1997 and remained in force for a decade, the allocation of subsidies among the regions was inversely proportional to their...

The past decade has seen significant changes in the structure of the corporate lending market, with non-commercial bank institutional investors playing larger roles than they historically have played. In addition, non-commercial bank institutional lenders are often equity holders in their...

Managers often claim that an important source of value in acquisitions is the acquiring firm's ability to finance investments for the target firm. This claim implies that targets are financially constrained prior to being acquired and that these constraints are eased following the acquisition....

Using a sample of control cross-border acquisitions from 56 countries from 1990 to 2007, we find that acquirers from better governed countries gain more from such acquisitions and their gains are higher when targets are from worse governed countries. Other acquirer country characteristics,...

We show that money market funds transmitted distress across firm during the European sovereign debt crisis. Using a novel data set of US money market fund holdings, we show that funds with large exposures to Eurozone banks suffered significant outflows between June and August 2011. These...

Defining as normal cash holdings the holdings a firm with the same characteristics would have had in the late 1990s, we find that the abnormal cash holdings of U.S. firms after the crisis represent on average 1.86% of assets. While U.S. firms held less cash than comparable foreign firms in the...