The Italian and European regulatory framework for patents would benefit from further improvements in order to foster dynamic competition between Italian firms. At the national level the exclusive allocation of the right to patent inventions to universities, rather than to researchers, would...

This paper studies the provision of incentives in a universal bank. This is regarded as a (common) agent serving different clients with potentially conflicting interests; for example, it may buy assets on behalf of investors and sell assets on behalf of issuing firms. The clients offer incentive...

This paper explores the implications of systemic risk in Credit Structured Finance (CSF). Risk measurement issues loomed large during the 2007-08 financial crisis, as the massive, unprecedented number of downgrades of AAA senior bond tranches inflicted severe losses on banks, calling into...

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...

This paper is a brief methodological note on the matching of Italian firms in the AIDA database with applicants at the European Patent Office from the PATSTAT database. The need to match data on patent applications with balance-sheet information stems from the importance of patent statistics as...

We empirically investigate the relevance of demand-side complementarity between electronic and traditional provision of banking services. Since no systematic data on prices for the two types of services is available, it is not possible to estimate cross-elasticities of demand. We resort to two...

Direct and country-specific measures of technical progress are used in order to analyse the effects of technology shocks on output fluctuations in the G7. Technology shocks are measured as the unpredicted component in the dynamics of innovation, on the basis of patent statistics provided by the...

To evaluate the effect of an R&D subsidy one needs to know what the subsidized firms would have done without the incentive. This paper studies an Italian programme of subsidies for the applied development of innovations, exploiting a discontinuity in programme financing due to an unexpected...

The lag in innovation in Italy vis-�-vis the other main industrial countries is one of the effects of the fragmentation of the production system into many small firms that have trouble bearing the high cost of R&D and taking the related risks. Such other causes as shortages in human capital...