We explore the nature of Business Groups, that is network-like forms of hierarchical organization between legally autonomous firms spanning both within and across national borders. Exploiting a unique dataset of 270,474 headquarters controlling more than 1,500,000 (domestic and foreign)...

Based on two strands of theoretical research, this paper provides new evidence on how fares are jointly affected by in-flight seat availability and purchasing date. As capacity-driven theories predict, it emerges that fares monotonically and substantially increase with the flights occupancy...

This paper describes the energy sector in the Mediterranean and MENA (Middle East and North Africa) countries. It first analyses the production of energy by fossil and renewable sources and discusses the increasing demand in the area and its consequences. It describes the policy frameworks to...

This paper analyses futures prices for four energy commodities (light sweet crude oil, heating oil, gasoline and natural gas) and five agricultural commodities (corn, oats, soybean oil, soybeans and wheat), over the period 1986-2010. Using CCC and DCC multivariate GARCH models, we find that...

This paper investigates how the ownership and the procedure for the selection of firms operating in the local public transport sector affect their productivity. In order to compare different institutional regimes, we carry out a comparative analysis of 72 companies operating in large European...

This paper evaluates how different types of speculation affect the volatility of commodities’ futures prices. We adopt four indexes of speculation: Working’s T, the market share of non-commercial traders, the percentage of net long speculators over total open interest in future markets,...

The paper analyses productivity spillovers from foreign MNEs on domestic manufacturing firms. Using a database on foreign MNEs in Italy, our results reveal that local firms do benefit from the presence of foreign MNEs, and the effect is higher when local and foreign firms in manufacturing...

We exploit a panel dataset of Hungarian firms merged with product-level trade data for the period 1992-2003 to investigate the relation between firms' trading activities (importing, exporting or both) and productivity. We find important self-selection effects of the most productive firms induced...