We quantify the private returns and social costs of political connections exploiting a unique longitudinal dataset that combines matched employer-employee data for a representative sample of Italian firms with administrative archives on the universe of individuals appointed in local governments...

How do political connections affect firm dynamics, innovation, and creative destruction? We extend a Schumpeterian growth model with political connections that help firms ease their bureaucratic and regulatory burden. The model highlights how political connections influence an economy's business...

Organized crime is widely regarded as damaging to the economy, to say nothing of people's lives. Yet little is known about the mechanism at work. This paper helps fill the gap by analyzing the impact of organized crime on the allocation of public subsidies to businesses. We assemble an...

We analyse the impact of exposure to corruption news on individuals' perceptions about the extent of the phenomenon. To this purpose, we take information on individuals' perceptions of the likelihood that corruption events may occur in everyday life and combine it with a dataset containing the...

The paper assesses the extent to which mortgage rates in Italy are priced according to credit risk as proxied by the probability of household mortgage delinquency estimated using the EU-Silc database. For reasons of data availability we restrict the analysis of mortgage pricing to Italian...

The aim of the paper is to estimate a reliable quarterly time-series of potential output for the Italian economy, exploiting four alternative approaches: a Bayesian unobserved component method, a univariate time-varying autoregressive model, a production function approach and a structural VAR....

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...

Optimal Portfolio Theory prescribes that investors reduce their exposure to financial market risk as they get near to retirement. To assess the effect of ageing on portfolio choices, we study the case of an Italian defined contribution pension fund during the period 2002-08. We find that on...

The paper provides an empirical investigation of the advantages accruing to workers in industrial clusters. Using a unique data set based on the Cluster Mapping Project of the Italian National Statistical Institute, we examine whether industry agglomeration leads to wage and labor mobility...

We analyse empirically the effects of urbanization on Italian college graduates' work possibilities as entrepreneurs three years after graduation. We find that doubling the population density of the province of work reduces the chances of being an entrepreneur by 2-3 percentage points. This...