During the past decade all industrial countries attracted sizeable inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI), excluding Italy and Japan: this fact has been interpreted as evidencing a deterioration in Italy�s structural competitiveness. This paper presents the results of a survey conducted...

We analyse the wide array of rescue programmes adopted in several countries, following Lehman Brothers� default in September 2008, in order to support banks and other financial institutions. We first provide an overview of the programmes, comparing their characteristics, magnitudes and...

Bank takeovers result on average in little improvements in performance. This may be due to conflicting driving forces behind them; however these have seldom been studied. We study directly the motivations for bank acquisitions by analyzing the prices paid for them, under the assumption that...

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...

The paper explores the long run evolution of Italy's performance in technological innovation as a function of international technology transfer, reconstructing the different phases and dimensions of Italian innovative activity, tracking the transfer of foreign technological knowledge through a...

The paper explores the long run evolution of Italy's performance in technological innovation as a function of international technology transfer, reconstructing the different phases and dimensions of Italian innovative activity, tracking the transfer of foreign technological knowledge through a...

After a quick profile of Italian foreign direct investments since 1900 and a short review of the main explanations of the lagged multinational growth by Italian manufacturing companies, a quick glimpse of business histories is given to the only two still today living "old protagonists" (Pirelli,...

This paper investigates which factors determine a bank's decision to expand its activities abroad and what determines its choice of the countries to invest in. The empirical analysis is conducted using firm-level data on foreign subsidiaries for a representative sample fo nearly 2,500 OECD banks.