Profit share in Italy has been growing between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, remaining stable at historically high levels since than. After dropping in the first half of the 1970s, owing to an unprecedented rapid rise in wages, profit share started to recover. The rise during the 1980s...

The Italian and German banking systems shared similar characteristics early in the 1990s but have evolved in different directions since then: Italy privatized its publicly-owned banks while Germany has maintained a large share of state-owned savings banks. Contemporaneously, banks in both...

The paper summarizes the framework used in a research project on local public services carried out by Bank of Italy researchers. It discusses motivations, characteristics, results and general lessons of the project, whose sector-specific results are detailed in individual papers. The project was...

This paper studies the timing of privatization in 21 major developed economies in the 1977-2002 period. Duration analysis shows that political fragmentation plays a significant role in explaining government's decision to privatize: privatization is delayed longer in democracies characterized by...

This paper studies the effects on local public transport of the reform begun in the late nineties, using data from a recent Bank of Italy survey. There are still substantial differences across Italy’s regions, and the level of efficiency is far from the original aims of the reform. Although...

This paper analyzes the potential and the limits of project finance for the provision of local public services and compares them with alternative instruments in the light of current regulation. The main requirements for project finance, even in non “pure” forms, to justify its complex...

The paper discusses the economic problem and the institutional features underlying the Nimby syndrome, and illustrates preliminary empirical evidence for Italy. It argues that siting procedures taking local preferences into account should be preferred when the heterogeneity in preferences across...

Regulatory complexity and bureaucracy inefficiencies increase the time needed and the cost of starting a business and therefore reduce the competitiveness of a country. Since the early 1990s Italy, in the same way as other developed countries, has been trying to introduce some reforms to boost...

In this paper we propose and validate cheating in standardized tests as a new indirect measure of social capital. Given the low-stakes nature of most of the tests examined here, we interpret the widespread presence of cheating as a signal of limited trustin central education authorities....

This paper studies how the independence and conservatism of a central bank relate to the structure and stability of the median voter preferences. This is done by means of a model of endogenous delegation in which an opportunistic policy-maker chooses the monetary regime (independence and...