Banks perform similar functions all over the world. Nevertheless, the banking systems around the world are very different. This paper analyses how the difference affects local firms as well as small and medium-sized enterprises. For my project, I combine banking and economic data of five EU...

This paper analyses intergovernmental transfers in France and Italy to assess how soft budget spending behaviors may result from slacks in institutional constraints or from phenomena related to political culture, like administrative practices or implementation of rules. It innovates on the...

Italy exhibits a very divided economy with an economic powerhouse in its northern regions and an economically less developed South. At the same time, the North of Italy is also characterized by a historically decentralized financial system with small and local banks that fit to the SMEs of the...

We examine the relationships between warfare, taxation, and political change in the context of the political unification of the Italian peninsula. Using a comprehensive new database, we argue that external and internal threat environments had significant implications for the demand for military...

This paper empirically investigates the impact of populist governments on public policies and finances. We focus on Italian local governments (i.e. municipalities) over the 2010-2019 period, when a populists, i.e. the Five Stars Movement, became the most voted party in the country. We first...

This paper contributes to the empirical literature on the magnitude of the network effects of public infrastructures, introducing a novel approach. After estimating the dynamics common to time series for the regional public capital stock, coordinated policy shocks are identified within a...

The general benefits of attracting FDI, HR and firms are commonly recognized by policy makers and analysts. Although it may seem natural to argue that most regions would like to attract FDI investment because it creates jobs, transfers technology and leads to more trade, existent literature...

This paper explores the political-administrative process which determines the release of siting permits in Italian power generation. The empirical analysis is an attempt to test whether the national and regional governments are efficient when they approve the location requests made by power...

Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) have been widely advocated as flexible contractual solutions enabling the public sector to profit from private firms' innovative solutions for providing public services. More recently, however, practitioners and academics alike have cast doubts on a possible...

This paper assesses the effects of public capital in Italy on the main macroeconomic aggregates: GDP, private capital and labour. A cointegrated vector autoregressive (VAR) model, in line with recent advancements in the field, allows us to take into account the complex nexus of direct and...