We perform an event study to investigate the efficiency of the Chinese stock market. We study the reaction of stock returns and trading volumes to the 2005-2006 structural reform which allowed the transformation of non-tradable shares (NTS) into tradable shares (TS) through payment of a...

In this paper we examine the empirical relationship between immigration and crime across Italian provinces during the period 1990-2003. Drawing on police data, we first document that the size of the immigrant population is positively correlated with the incidence of property crimes and with the...

We quantify the private returns and social costs of political connections exploiting a unique longitudinal dataset that combines matched employer-employee data for a representative sample of Italian firms with administrative archives on the universe of individuals appointed in local governments...

Cultural traits shape both the scope and the consequences of government intervention. Failing to account for cultural differences may therefore bias the estimated effects of regulation. This paper investigates the direction and the magnitude of this bias, from both a theoretical and an empirical...

I examine the post-war economic development of two regions in southern Italy exposed to mafia activity after the 1970s and apply synthetic control methods to estimate their counterfactual economic performance in the absence of organized crime. The synthetic control is a weighted average of other...

We estimate the causal effect of immigrants' legal status on criminal behavior exploiting exogenous variation in migration restrictions across nationalities driven by the last round of the European Union enlargement. Unique individual-level data on a collective clemency bill enacted in Italy...

This paper argues that the liberalization of capital inflows in a small open economy with a financial system dominated by banks may provoke a soft budget constraint distortion, because large amounts of funds become available at relatively low cost. International investors internalize the risk of...

The paper analyzes the problems of measurement of durable consumer prices posed by quality change. Theoretical price indexes are defined and used to analyze several empirical methods of estimation of quality adjusted price indexes. The paper shows that hedonic regressions and other quality...

In dynamic panel data models, which are particularly well-suited to cross-country analysis, the Mean Group estimator (Pesaran and Smith, 1995) is under certain quite strong conditions consistent, but theoretical and empirical evidence indicates that it can be biased when the number of time...

The question addressed by this study is whether consumers remember past prices correctly. We test Italian citizens� memory for cinema prices with questionnaires distributed to moviegoers. The analysis concentrates on the memory of pre-euro prices, but the recall for a more recent period is...