"The book draws lessons on the importance of rewarding merit for economic growth by analysing Italy's decline in the past few decades. Connections rather than merit are a long-standing feature of the Italian elites, even in the corporate sector. This became a significant problem when Italy could...

A coincidence in time between the volatility break associated with the "Great Moderation" and large changes in the pattern of conditional and unconditional correlations between output, hours and labor productivity was detected by Galí and Gambetti (2009). We provide a novel explanation for...

Firm performance is known to benefit from participation in import markets. For this reason, understanding whether credit constraints hamper firms' ability to purchase foreign inputs is a relevant issue. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between financial constraints and imports of...