This paper examines the financial structure and the bank relationships of Italian multinational firms. We show that multinationals are on average more leveraged than non-internationalized firms. Moreover, they have a larger share of financial and bank debt out of total debt, maintain more bank...

This paper investigates empirically whether inward greenfield foreign direct investment (FDI) is related to greater sectorial innovation in the host Italian provinces. We combine several sources of data to estimate panel count models, regressing the annual number of patents in each province and...

The aim of this paper is to evaluate whether domestic and foreign activities of Italian firms are mainly substitutes or complements. We take advantage of a unique firm-level panel data set from the Bank of Italy Survey of Industrial and Service Firms, which provides information on the...

A growing number of studies on the US subprime market indicate that, due to asymmetric information, credit risk transfer activities have perverse effects on banks' lending standards. We investigate a large part of the market for securitized assets (“prime mortgages”) in Italy, a country with...

We estimate the contemporaneous effect of education on adolescent crime by exploiting the variation in crime rates between different cohorts and at different ages that followed a reform that raised the school-leaving age in Italy. A 1 percentage-point increase of the enrollment rate reduces...