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...

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 analyses banking convergence, measured through the ratios of deposits and loans to GDP, across 65 countries, compares it with per capita income convergence, and tests its effect on real convergence. The focus of the paper is the group of countries that have adopted the euro as a...

The paper considers likelihood ratio (LR) tests of stationarity, common trends and cointegration for multivariate time series. As the distribution of these tests is not known, a bootstrap version is proposed via a state space representation. The bootstrap samples are obtained from the Kalman...