In this paper we analyze the role of the relationship between investment and finance as the main source of both financial instability and business cycle fluctuations. By building an agent-based model, our aim is to explicitly consider the complex nature of credit markets as strongly interactive...

We investigate the shape of the Italian personal income distribution using microdata from the Survey on Household Income and Wealth, made publicly available by the Bank of Italy for the years 1977-2002. We find that the upper tail of the distribution is consistent with a Pareto power-law type...