In the last decade, and especially in the course of the recent global economic slowdown, the gap between southern and northern industry has widened. Industrial investment and employment decreased more sharply in the South than in the rest of Italy, and the contribution of the southern regions to...

This paper compares the return to pre-crisis levels and the long-term performance of exports in the main Italian regions compared with some European regions with a similar production structure. The results show that the intensity and timing of recovery in the cyclical component of exports were...

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...

In the last decade R&D expenditure in Italy has been lagging at a bare 1.2-1.3 per cent of GDP. Its private share is low by international standards and Italian firms take out only a small number of patents. External sources of innovation, however, are available to firms. This work aims at...

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...

This paper presents the main findings of the Survey on Household Income and Wealth for the Italian region of Lombardy. To get a large enough sample, the observations on 2004, 2006, and 2008 were pooled. The work sets out the structural characteristics for Lombardy prior to the crisis, with...

This paper provides a detailed insight into the magnitude of price-level differentials among Italian regions, supplementing the data collected by Istat with information on house prices and rentals collected by Agenzia del Territorio and by the Bank of Italy and with estimates from other sources....

The Economy of the Italian Regions in the year 2006 analyzes the evolution of production, labour market, financial aggregates and regional public finances in the four main Italian territorial areas. Topics analyzed focus on structural change in the Italian economy; trends in Mezzogiorno's...

We examine the impact of immigration on the residential market within urban areas. We develop a spatial equilibrium model that shows how the effect of an immigrant inflow in a district affects local housing prices through changes in how natives perceive the quality of their local amenities and...

The volume collects the papers presented at the Conference on "Banks, Local Credit Markets and Credit Supply" held in Milan, on 24 March 2010. The papers presented at the two sessions of the Conference analyse how banks' lending activities are organized and how this affects the supply of credit...