Even before the global crisis, the Italian economy was in difficulties internationally, but slow growth and a declining share of world trade were accompanied by a perceptible process of manufacturing transformation. This paper, using data from the Bank of Italy's survey of manufacturers,...

We investigate the causal relationship between judicial efficiency and firm size across Italian municipalities exploiting spatial discontinuities in court jurisdictions for identification. The estimated coefficients suggest that the reduction of the length of civil proceedings could exert, all...

We consider a standard result of customer market theory: if firms have stable customer relations and face financial frictions, they may keep prices relatively high in times of low demand and vice versa. Indeed, during recessions, when firms have low cash flow and greater difficulty in raising...

We make use of an allocation rule by the ECB for Targeted Longer-Term Refinancing Operations (TLTROs) to provide causal evidence on the effect of unconventional monetary policy on the cost of loans to firms. Using transaction-level data from Italy's Central Credit Register and a...

This paper analyzes consumer inattention in the market of checking accounts. I examine the behavior of consumers who keep account tariffs that are dominated, i.e. that charge higher costs for any amount of bank services consumed through the account, by tariffs available at the same bank and...

This paper analyses respondents' behaviour when reporting their income sources in sample surveys and presents a method to deal with response error. Survey data relating to the number of earning recipients and to amounts received are validated using external information from administrative and...

The unsatisfactory performance of Italian export volumes in the last decade has been attributed to three factors: the product specialization still centered around traditional sectors, the small firm size and the exceptional rise in export unit values. This paper analyzes the latter with the aim...

This paper examines the dynamic interaction between R&D and market structure in a horizontally differentiated market framework. Firms invest in R&D to modify the level of differentiation of their products, increasing their specialization and their market power. The invested resources in research...

The aim of the paper is to understand the interaction between market and credit risk. Using a comprehensive set of Italian data, we apply a factor model to identify the common sources of risk driving fluctuations in the real and financial sectors. The common latent factors are then inserted in a...

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...