We look at business survey data on Italian internationalized firms’ characteristics and performances since the outbreak of the 2008 crisis until 2012. Among Italian firms with 20 employees or more, an increasing share (from 7.1 to 13.2% between 2006 and 2011) owns a foreign productive unit....

The supply chain of the real estate sector accounts for one fifth of Italian GDP; its importance for the banking system is even greater: lending to this sector accounts for more than one third of total loans to the private sector. The crisis in the construction and real estate sector started...

The paper describes the characteristics of the market for private placements and discusses the necessary conditions for their uptake in Europe. A private placement is a method of financing used mainly by medium-sized companies which, unable to access the public bond market, turn to one or more...

We study how aggregate volatility is influenced by the propagation of idiosyncratic shocks across firms through the network of ownership relations. We use detailed data on cross-holdings as well as the relevant balance sheet information for almost the entire universe of Italian limited liability...

This paper explores the effects of husbands' commuting time on their wives' labour market participation and on family time allocation. We develop a unitary family model of labour supply, which includes commuting times and household production. In a pure leisure model longer commuting time for...

This paper contributes to the literature on the effectiveness of R&D incentives by evaluating a unique investment subsidy program implemented in northern Italy. Firms were invited to submit proposals for new projects and only those that scored above a certain threshold received the subsidy. We...

The paper argues that the traditional difficulty encountered in finding evidence on the effects of credit availability on economic activity depends on the fact that these effects are powerful but rare and vary with the cycle. The global financial crisis offers an opportunity to test this...

To evaluate the effect of an R&D subsidy one needs to know what the subsidized firms would have done without the incentive. This paper studies an Italian programme of subsidies for the applied development of innovations, exploiting a discontinuity in programme financing due to an unexpected...

In this paper, we test whether micro firms run by migrants pay more for credit than firms run by natives and whether the differences in the cost of credit for these two groups of entrepreneurs decrease as the informational and cultural gaps narrow. We employ a large and unique data set providing...

We empirically analyse the returns of both Italian and round-trip open-end funds managed by Italian asset management companies (SGRs) in the period 2003-2008. Taking into account a modified version of the capital asset pricing model (CAPM), we estimated a performance measure for each asset...