This paper estimates the causal impact of dismissal costs on capital deepening and productivity exploiting a reform that introduced unjust-dismissal costs in Italy for firms below 15 employees, leaving ring costs unchanged for larger firms. We show that the increase in firing costs induces an...

We study, both theoretically and empirically, how trade imbalances affect the structure of countries exports and wage inequality. We show that, in a Heckscher-Ohlin model with a continuum of goods, a Southern (Northern) trade surplus leads to an increase (reduction) in the average skill...

We introduce imperfect information in stock prices determination. Agents receive a noisy signal about the structural shock driving future dividend variations. Equilibrium stock prices include a transitory "noise bubble" which can be responsible for boom and bust episodes unrelated to economic...

We investigate the role of "noise" shocks as a source of business cycle fluctuations. To do so we set up a simple model of imperfect information and derive restrictions for identifying the noise shock in a VAR model. The novelty of our approach is that identification is reached by means of...

The objective of this note is to present the evolution of both the economics and the political economy of monetary policy in the last three decades – first the Great Moderation and then the Financial Crisis – as a story of two intertwined tales: on the one side the tale of how to govern...

This paper addresses the difficulties of accurately defining a SWF, discusses the evolution of the original SWFs from stabilization to wealth funds, and examines how SWFs are organized and funded. We also detail the key measures developed to assess the operational and informational transparency...

Using a sample of 1,018 Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) equity investments in publicly traded firms and a control sample of 5,975 transactions by private-sector financial institutions over 1980-2012, we find that announcement-period abnormal returns of SWF investments are positive, but lower than...

This article presents an overview of the evolution of financial supervision as emerging and relevant tool of the overall economic policy design. We concentrate our analysis on the last three decades, considering the situation in both the advanced and emerging countries and with a special eye on...