Investment in public research in Italy is below the European average as a percentage of GDP. Nevertheless, in relation to expenditure and the number of researchers, the output is high, and the quality of research, conducted in universities and research organizations, is close to that of such...

The aim of this paper is to estimate the effects of the expansion of tertiary education supply on the educational choices of young Italian high school graduates. A quasi-experimental setting given by the reform of the tertiary education system implemented in 2001 is exploited. The reform was...

A remarkable feature of short-term business finance is the widespread use of trade credit as collateral in bank borrowing, especially by small and medium-sized firms. The paper models the incentives for a firm to collateralize accounts receivable as a trade-off between the benefit from lower...

We examine the informational effects of M&As by investigating whether bank mergers improve banks� ability to screen borrowers. By exploiting a dataset in which we observe a measure of a borrower�s default risk that the lenders observe only imperfectly, we find evidence of these...

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...

The unsatisfactory performance of Italian export volumes in the last decade has been attributed to three factors; the product specialization still centered around traditional sectors, the small firm size and the exceptional rise in export unit values. This paper analyzes the latter with the aim...

Even before the global crisis, the Italian economy was in difficulties internationally, but slow growth and a declining share of world trade were accompanied by a perceptible process of manufacturing transformation. This paper, using data from the Bank of Italy�s survey of manufacturers,...

This paper analyses how banks organize their lending activity by using the results of two surveys carried out in 2006 and in 2009. During this period, the use of rating and scoring methodologies became more widespread even among the smaller banks. Larger banks used these techniques more...

The paper compares the quality of Italian Medical schools� freshmen on the basis of the scores obtained in the locally conducted entry exams which are using a common national test frame. The test is quite selective (partly because of the reduced size of the intake yearly allowed): winners...

We analyse how the labour market implicitly evaluates Italy's higher education system by estimating differences in employment and earnings across universities. We use our estimates to produce three rankings of universities based, respectively, on employment, earnings and employment-weighted...