The paper analyses the main differences in the financial structure of Italian and European non financial corporations in the 2004-2007 period, that is during the years before the financial crisis. The research is based on individual balance sheets of Amadeus (Analyse Major Databases from...

This work investigates the role of equity ownership for the purpose of committing the management to the pursuit of shareholder value in the presence of separation between ownership and control. By rooting the conflicts of interests between managers and shareholders upon the control of internal...

During the recent global recession both the export-oriented northern Italian regions and those in the far less open South experienced a sharp decline in economic activity. One of the possible explanations is the existence of strong domestic linkages propagating foreign demand shocks from North...

The full insurance hypothesis states that shocks to the firm's performance do not affect workers' compensation. In principal-agent models withmoral hazard, firms trade off insurance and incentives to induce workers to supply the optimal level of effort. We use a long panel of matched...

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 multimarket contact hypothesis holds that more contacts between firms competing in the same markets may induce more collusion. This paper tests the hypothesis for the Italian banking market, analysing the behaviour of the largest Italian banks from 1990 to 1996. Market rivalry is gauged by...

Despite the fact that it provides a potentially useful analytical tool, allowing for the joint modeling of dynamic interdependencies within a group of connected areas, until lately the VAR approach had received little attention in regional science and spatial economic analysis. This paper aims...

In this paper, we exploit the heterogeneity in the forecasts obtained by estimating different factor models to measure forecast uncertainty. Our approach is simple and intuitive. It consists first in selecting all the models that outperform some benchmark model, and then in constructing an...

Several factors contribute to attracting foreign investment: cyclical, such as demand fluctuations; structural, such as industrial specialization or the presence of natural resources; fiscal policy, including taxes; political, such as social stability and country governance; and finally, the...