Why do some countries suffer from backward financial institutions and weak corporate governance rules? We show that, even if, overall, the economy would benefit corporate governance reforms, not all the agents would stand to gain from the improvement. In particular, entrepreneurs and firms that...

The topic of financing long-term investment is on the top of the agenda of economic policy makers and it is among the priorities of the Italian Presidency of the European Union. The paper describes the main international initiatives in the field and highlights the three most promising courses of...

The paper describes the characteristics of the market for private placements and discusses the necessary conditions for their uptake in Europe. A private placement is a method of financing used mainly by medium-sized companies which, unable to access the public bond market, turn to one or more...

Information from the Survey of Italian Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) is not normally used as a basis for regional estimates on account of the small sample size. This paper presents an experimental estimation of regional aggregates for the period 1995-2000, obtained by combining several...

This paper presents an application of neural network models to predictive classification for data quality control. Our aim is to identify data affected by measurement error in the Bank of Italy�s business surveys. We build an architecture consisting of three feed-forward networks for...

This paper aims to describe non-respondents in the Bank of Italy�s Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) and to measure the underestimation of income and wealth attributable to non-response. The evidence confirms that non-response is not random, since it is more frequent among...

Sample surveys providing high quality information on both total household expenditure (consumption) and income are not commonly available. Nevertheless, surveys focusing on income usually do collect some information on expenditure data. A main drawback of this practice is that it could let some...

The objective of the paper is to adjust for the bias due to unit non-response and measurement error in survey estimates of total household financial wealth. Sample surveys are a useful source of information on household wealth. Yet, survey estimates are affected by non-sampling errors. In...

While there is a wide consensus in using survey weights when estimating population parameters, it is not clear what to do when using survey data for analytic purposes (i.e. with the objective of making inference about model parameters). In the model-based framework (MB), under the hypothesis...