In 2007 the new framework for capital adequacy of banks (Basel 2), defined in 2004 by the Basel Committee for Banking Supervision, will replace the 1988 Accord (Basel 1) in all major countries. In the last years the Committee has carried out several impact studies in order to simulate the...

This paper investigates the impact of outsourcing on sectoral reallocation in the U.S. over the period 1947-2007, and on the rise in services in particular. Roughly 40% of the growth of the service sector comes from professional and business services. This is an unusual industry as more than 90%...

The technology balance of payments concerns external transactions in disembodied technology. Since the introduction in Italy of a new data collection system based mainly on direct reporting by enterprises, credits and debits tend to be appreciably greater than they had been under the old system...

This paper analyses the market for professional (expert) services where the experts are motivated by reputational concerns. A key feature of such markets, which is often overlooked, is that clients can have specific characteristics that affect their evaluation of the service, and (or) the...

In this paper we investigate the relationship between the number of lawyers and civil litigation across Italian provinces over the period 2000-2005. First, we document the existence of a positive correlation between the number of lawyers and litigation. We then employ a 2SLS approach to verify...

We analyze the problem of strategic poaching of consultants by clients with particular reference to the business consulting industry. This article presents a market equilibrium in a mixed economy where three categories of agents, consulting groups, client firms and consultants strategically...

In the estimation of risk measures such as Value at Risk and Expected shortfall relatively short estimation windows are typically used rendering the estimation error a possibly non-negligible component. In this paper we build upon previous results for the Value at Risk and discuss how the...

In general, the properties of the conditional distribution of multiple period returns do not follow easily from the one-period data generating process. This renders computation of Value-at-Risk and Expected Shortfall for multiple period returns a non-trivial task. In this paper we consider some...

In this note it is argued that the estimation error in Value-at-Risk predictors gives rise to underestimation of portfolio risk. We propose a simple correction and find in an empirical illustration that it is economically relevant.