The Italian and European regulatory framework for patents would benefit from further improvements in order to foster dynamic competition between Italian firms. At the national level the exclusive allocation of the right to patent inventions to universities, rather than to researchers, would...

This paper is a brief methodological note on the matching of Italian firms in the AIDA database with applicants at the European Patent Office from the PATSTAT database. The need to match data on patent applications with balance-sheet information stems from the importance of patent statistics as...

We estimate the contemporaneous effect of education on adolescent crime by exploiting the variation in crime rates between different cohorts and at different ages that followed a reform that raised the school-leaving age in Italy. A 1 percentage-point increase of the enrollment rate reduces...

In this paper we examine the empirical relationship between immigration and crime across Italian provinces during the period 1990-2003. Drawing on police data, we first document that the size of the immigrant population is positively correlated with the incidence of property crimes and with the...

This paper analyzes the relationship between the terms on bank loans and local crime rates, employing a sample of over 300,000 bank-firm relationships. Controlling for firm, market and bank characteristics the results show that where the crime rate is higher borrowers pay higher interest rates,...

Why do some countries suffer from backward financial institutions and weak corporate governance rules? We show that, even if, overall, the economy would benefit corporate governance reforms, not all the agents would stand to gain from the improvement. In particular, entrepreneurs and firms that...

We estimate the causal effect of immigrants' legal status on criminal behavior exploiting exogenous variation in migration restrictions across nationalities driven by the last round of the European Union enlargement. Unique individual-level data on a collective clemency bill enacted in Italy...

The Italian administrative system is currently perceived as one of the main obstacles to a higher growth of the productive system. We argue that some causes of this ineffectiveness are deeply rooted and date back at the unification: a missing strong administrative tradition; an (excessive)...

This paper analyzes the relations between businesses seized from organized crime and the banking system. The first part of the paper examines legislative developments regarding seized and confiscated assets and highlights the persistence of problem areas despite the efforts to create a...

We contribute to the debate on how to assess the size of the underground or shadow economy with a reinterpretation of the traditional Currency Demand Approach (CDA) � la Tanzi. We introduce three main innovations. First, we take as dependent variable in the money demand equation a direct...