Today, the European Union (EU) and in particular its common currency area created in 1998, the Eurozone, is going through an economic crisis that, given its duration, can be defined as structural and enduring and is such as to put the common political project at risk. This article retraces the...

This paper analyzes the existing relationship between ethnic fractionalization, corruption and the growth rate of a country. We provide a simple theoretical model. We show that a nonlinear relationship between fractionalization and corruption exists: corruption is high in homogeneous or very...

We study the ex-ante budget devoted by a Political Principal to a Competition Authority in charge of collecting evidence on the Industry's behavior. The Industry can capture both the Principal (lobbying) for a reduced budget, and the Authority (side-contracting) so as to avoid fines. Authority's...

With the adoption of a common currency the degree of substitution between financial instruments supplied by EMU Member States to finance their national debts has risen. Providing the market for euro-denominated government securities with a large volume of similar financial instruments is likely...

This paper deals with the relationship between regulatory compliance, bureaucratic corruption, lobbying and the industrial structure of a country. We show that lobbying and bureaucratic corruption can coexist at the macro level when we allow for heterogeneity in firm size. Countries with similar...

In this paper we explore theoretically the relationship between explicit and implicit/relational contracting distinguishing between the ex-ante decision to sign an explicit contract and the ex-post decision wheter to actually apply it. We show, among other things, that the relational efficient...

Fostering whistleblowing through leniency and asymmetric sanctions is regarded as a potentially powerful anti-corruption strategy in the light of its success in busting cartels. The US Department of Justice started a pilot program of this kind in 2016. It has been argued, however, that...

We run a regression discontinuity design analysis to document the causal effect of increasing buyers' discretion on procurement outcomes in a large database for public works in Italy. Works with a value above a given threshold have to be awarded through an open auction. Works below this...

Law-breaking activities within an organization benefiting the firm at the expense of the general public are widespread but difficult to uncover, making whistleblowing by employees desirable. We employ a novel laboratory experiment to investigate if and how monetary incentives and expectations of...

In many environments, including credit and online markets, past records about participants are collected, published, and erased after some time. We study the effects of erasing past records on trade and welfare in a dynamic market where each seller's quality follows a Markov process and buyers...