Using a regression discontinuity design, we document the effect of publicizing a procurement auction on entry and outcomes. We collect a large sample of procurement auctions, which by Italian law are assigned different publicity levels on the basis of their reserve price. We find that auctions...

I set up an endogenous merger model in which, whenever fi rms agree to join in a coalition, the new entity acquires the leadership in a symmetric Cournot oligopoly. I first explore the case of a single merger and show that, despite being such merger pro table irrespective of the number of...

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...

We show that in an infinitely repeated Cournot game when firms adopt stick and carrot strategies exogenous horizontal mergers are profitable regardless the size of the merged entity. We characterize an equilibrium in which the new entity maximizes its discounted intertemporal profit under the...

We consider the problem of estimating the high-dimensional autocovariance matrix of a stationary random process, with the purpose of out of sample prediction and feature extraction. This problem has received several solutions. In the nonparametric framework, the literature has concentrated on...

In this paper, we study the predictive power of dense and sparse estimators in a high dimensional space. We propose a new forecasting method, called Elastically Weighted Principal Components Analysis (EWPCA) that selects the variables, with respect to the target variable, taking into account the...

Electricity spot prices are subject to transitory sharp movements commonly referred to as spikes. The paper aims at assessing their effects on model based inferences and predictions, with reference to the Nord Pool power exchange. We identify a spike as a price value which deviates substantially...

This paper studies the behaviour of crypto-currencies financial time-series of which Bitcoin is the most prominent example. The dynamic of those series is quite complex displaying extreme observations, asymmetries and several nonlinear characteristics which are difficult to model. We develop a...

Structural change affects the estimation of economic signals, like the underlying growth rate or the seasonally adjusted series. An important issue, which has attracted a great deal of attention also in the seasonal adjustment literature, is its detection by an expert procedure. The...

Extracting and forecasting the volatility of financial markets is an important empirical problem. Time series of realized volatility or other volatility proxies, such as squared returns, display long range dependence. Exponential smoothing (ES) is a very popular and successful forecasting and...