This paper investigates the relationship between futures prices and financial investments in derivatives of the main agricultural commodities. We first provide a broad picture of how these markets function and how they have evolved, showing that traders who deal mostly in commodity index...

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....

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...

In this paper we examine whether and how the inflow of female immigrants who “specialize” in household production affects the labor supply of Italian women. To identify the causal effect, we exploit the family reunification motive and the network effects - i.e. the tendency of newly arriving...

The literature on debt restructuring usually assumes that banks behave in a uniform way towards firms in distress. Using a recent survey of Italian banks, we show that banks follow different strategies when they decide whether to take part in the workout process, in that some of them do...

This paper combines qualitative information from the Eurosystem Bank Lending Survey with micro-data on loan prices and quantities for the participating Italian banks to assess the role of supply and demand factors in credit developments, with a focus on the sharp slowdown of 2008-09. Both demand...