In a general setting with uncertainty and spillovers in R&D activity, we consider the incentive to cooperate among firms at any or all of the following three stages. Firms can jointly agree on the level of R&D expenditures, they can set up joint research facilities, and/or they can engage in an...

The paper examines the main factors that affect the incentive to cooperate in R&D, inquiring into the effects of cooperation on incentives to innovate in both a complete and an incomplete contract framework. It considers several forms of cooperative agreements and studies the circumstances that...

In this paper, we seek to empirically assess which determinants of the capability and incentives of banks to screen and monitor firms are significant in explaining credit rationing to Italian SMEs. After testing for the presence of non-random selection bias and the potential endogeneity of some...

The advanced countries are now going through the worst crisis since the Depression, but today's dominant current theories and econometric models proved unable to predict the crisis. The paper investigates whether the financial instability hypothesis of Hyman P. Minsky offers a better...