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...

This paper analyzes the pillar of the modern central bank governance – independence – offering three contributions. After a systematic review of the economics of central bank independence, a principal agent model is used to design a political economy framework, which explains how the...

In the last years, the design of supervision against money laundering has become increasingly essential in agendas of governments through the creation of specialized agencies: the Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs). The economics of Anti Money Laundering (AML) suggested that the Financial model...

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 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...

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...