This paper documents the existence of striking regional differences in the reported behaviour of employees working within the same firm but in different Italian regions. In particular, the frequency of recorded and punished misconduct episodes is significantly higher among employees working in...

An important component of the long-run cost of a war is the loss of human capital suffered by children in schooling age who receive less education because of the war. This paper shows that in the European countries involved in WWII, children who were ten years old during the conflict were...

A state school system should be expected to reduce income inequality and make intergenerational mobility easier. It is therefore somewhat surprising to observe that Italy, in comparison to the US, displays less inequality between occupational incomes but a lower degree of intergenerational...

In this paper we analyze the relationship between unemployment and consumption. We study this relationship with panel data on households in five countries. Our empirical relsuts indicate that an increase in the duration of unemployment spells of male household heads is associated with smaller...

Recent economic developments have shown the importance of spillover and contagion effects in financial markets. Such effects are not limited to relations between the levels of financial variables but also impact on their volatility. I investigate Granger causality in conditional mean and...

We consider an economy where individuals face uninsurable risks to their human capital accumulation, and study the problem of determining the optimal level of linear taxes on capital and labor income together with the optimal path of the debt level. We show both analytically and numerically that...

Spillover and contagion effects have gained significant interest in the recent years of financial crisis. Attention has not only been directed to relations between returns of financial variables, but to spillovers in risk as well. I use the family of Constant Conditional Correlation GARCH models...

We study a general equilibrium model in which firms choose their capital structure optimally, trading off the tax advantages of debt against the risk of costly default. The costs of default are endogenous: bankrupt firms are forced to liquidate their assets, resulting in a fire sale if there is...

In markets where transactions are governed by contractual incompleteness, revealed intentions to evade taxes may affect market performance. We experimentally examine the impact of tax evasion attempts on the performance of credence goods markets, where contractual incompleteness results from...

Credence goods, such as car repairs or medical services, are characterized by severe informational asymmetries between sellers and consumers, leading to fraud in the form of provision of insufficient service (undertreatment), provision of unnecessary service (overtreatment) and charging too much...