We look at business survey data on Italian internationalized firms’ characteristics and performances since the outbreak of the 2008 crisis until 2012. Among Italian firms with 20 employees or more, an increasing share (from 7.1 to 13.2% between 2006 and 2011) owns a foreign productive unit....

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...

In this paper I study two methods often used in public procurement to deal with the risk that the winning bidder may default on his bid: augmenting the standard first price auction with an ex-post verification of the responsiveness of the bids and using an average bid auction. I show that when...

The World Bank's procurement sector performs yearly operations ranging from $20 to $40 billion, half of which financing civil works. The share of contracts assigned to Italian firms peaked at 4 per cent in 2007-2012 (6 per cent in the civil works sector), significantly improving the level of the...

The supply chain of the real estate sector accounts for one fifth of Italian GDP; its importance for the banking system is even greater: lending to this sector accounts for more than one third of total loans to the private sector. The crisis in the construction and real estate sector started...

This paper considers the problem of testing against stochastic trend and seasonality in the presence of structural breaks and unit roots at frequencies other than those directly under test, which we term unattended breaks and unattended unit roots respectively. We show that under unattended...

The paper considers tests of seasonal integration and cointegration for multivariate time series. The locally best invariant (LBI) test of the null hypothesis of a deterministic seasonal pattern against the alternative of seasonal integration is derived for a model with Gaussian i.i.d....

Large and growing international financial linkages between East and West have altered the nature of the stability risks faced by European banking systems, increasing susceptibility to contagion. This paper aims to identify potential risks of cross-border contagion using a sample of large Western...

The paper considers likelihood ratio (LR) tests of stationarity, common trends and cointegration for multivariate time series. As the distribution of these tests is not known, a bootstrap version is proposed via a state space representation. The bootstrap samples are obtained from the Kalman...