The functioning of the Italian civil justice system is characterized by deep regional disparities: the length of legal proceedings is on average significantly higher in the South than in the rest of Italy. Using mainly a descriptive approach, this paper documents these differences and...

Despite accounting for a significant fraction of total litigation in Italy, small claims litigation has so far received little attention. Using a Ministry of Justice database that contains information disaggregated by subject matter, the paper provides a thorough description of the time trend...

Organized crime is widely regarded as damaging to the economy, to say nothing of people�s lives. Yet little is known about the mechanism at work. This paper helps fill the gap by analyzing the impact of organized crime on the allocation of public subsidies to businesses. We assemble an...

I examine the post-war economic development of two regions in southern Italy exposed to mafia activity after the 1970s and apply synthetic control methods to estimate their counterfactual economic performance in the absence of organized crime. The synthetic control is a weighted average of other...

We investigate the causal relationship between judicial efficiency and firm size across Italian municipalities exploiting spatial discontinuities in court jurisdictions for identification. The estimated coefficients suggest that the reduction of the length of civil proceedings could exert, all...

This paper empirically investigates the role of the efficiency of judicial enforcement in shaping firms� financial structure, by focusing on the choice between trade credit and alternative external sources. Suppliers have an advantage over other short-term lenders in enforcing credit...

We propose a portfolio selection model based on a class of monotone preferences that coincide with mean-variance preferences on their domain of monotonicity, but differ where mean-variance preferences fail to be monotone and are therefore not economically meaningful. The functional associated to...

The paper analyses the sharp divergence in the nineties between capital formation in the main euro area countries, on the one hand, and the United States, on the other. We have used data from the OECD's International Sectoral Data Base (ISDB), which includes data comparable across a certain...

The question addressed by this study is whether consumers remember past prices correctly. We test Italian citizens� memory for cinema prices with questionnaires distributed to moviegoers. The analysis concentrates on the memory of pre-euro prices, but the recall for a more recent period is...

We use household survey data to construct a direct measure of absolute risk aversion based on the maximum price a consumer is willing to pay to buy a risky asset. We relate this measure to a set of consumers� decisions that in theory should vary with attitude towards risk. We find that...