A law issued to combat political corruption and ma.a in.ltration of city councils in Italy has resulted in episodes of large, unanticipated, temporary contractions in local public spending. Using these episodes as instruments, we estimate the output multiplier of spending cuts at provincial...

We provide international evidence on the relationship between the extent of underpricing related to initial public offerings (IPOs) and the distance of the issuing firm from the financial centre of a country: for France, Germany and Italy, the higher the distance, the higher the level of...

In concurrence with the recent credit crisis, the Italian government tried to stimulate R&D expenditures through tax credit. We rely on this policy to identify the firm response to an exogenous countercyclical fiscal shock. Large heterogeneity by the size of cash is observed for firms in...

When the government provides public services necessary to production tax evasion results in some degree of income redistribution which may imply an higher or a lower level of aggregate income in the longrun. The outcome mainly depends on the burden of …scal pressure. If the tax administration...

In this paper we consider a simple economy where self interested taxpayers may have incentives to evade taxes and to escape sanctions, by bribing public officials in charge for tax collection. The level of monitoring and the level of corruption are endogenously determined assuming that the price...

This paper relies on sectoral-level data to interpret aggregate fluctuations of labor productivity and employment in US as due to exogenous disturbances. A shock determining permanent effect on the real investment good price may reasonably be interpreted as an investment-specific technology...

We study a manufacturer-retailer relationship where, besides the adverse selection and moral hazard components, it is explicitly considered a type-dependent participation constraint capturing the shadow cost of exclusive dealings. The welfare effects of contracts based on both retail price and...

During the first half of the 1990s a pool of Italian judges carried out an investigation, named Mani Pulite (literally clean hands), that led many public officials to be prosecuted and convicted because of bribery and embezzlement. The impact of Mani Pulite was so much influential that since...

Since 1991 the Italian Legislator grants amnesties, protection and even economic bene.ts to former mobsters cooperating with the justice. These incentives were intro- duced to break down omertà. What is the economic logic behind this policy? Did the program succeed? To address these issues we...

Exploiting three earthquakes in Italy as quasi-experiments, we analyze the response of homeowners’ consumption to transfers targeted to finance housing repair and reconstruction. To the extent that funds are made available up-front, these transfers are akin to loans, mainly affecting the...