This paper evaluates the performance of Italian local public enterprises (LPEs) with respect to their private sector counterparts. We address the following questions: i) do LPEs perform worse than (comparable) private firms?; ii) does the performance gap depend on the ownership structure (the...

This paper investigates why workers choose the public versus the private sector to understand which aspects of public sector labour contracts should be improved to attract more high-skilled individuals. Using data from the 2014 wave of the Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW), the paper...

We construct local-level statistical indicators of corruption based on the number of reported crimes, on citizens' trust in local public institutions, on perceptions of administrations' integrity and on the quality of public expenditure and we examine the impact that the presence of corruption,...

The paper analyses the main differences in the financial structure of Italian and European non financial corporations in the 2004-2007 period, that is during the years before the financial crisis. The research is based on individual balance sheets of Amadeus (Analyse Major Databases from...