The aim of the paper is to study empirically the rent dissipation hypothesis in the case of Italy before the creation of the National Bank of Italy in 1893. The major bank of the state of Italy – the Banca Nazionale Sarda (BNS) – experienced over the period 1866-1893 a decrease in its...

The aim of the paper is to examine the hypothesis of rent dissipation in the case of the Italian banking system during the suspension of gold convertibility. The major bank of the new born state of Italy – the Banca Nazionale nel regno d’Italia – experienced over the period 1866-1881 a...

The subprime crisis triggered a series of bankruptcies and bank runs at a level never experienced since the Great Depression. The banking environment radically changed since the 1930's, in particular the development of information technology decreases considerably the cost of information....

La période 1861-1896 est particulièrement mouvementée en Italie relativement à l'évolution du système financier, avec la sortie de l'étalon or (1866), les successions des régimes rélementaires des banques d'émission (1861-66, 1866-74, 1874-81, 1881-93), les crises boursières (1872-73,...

We show that the dynamics of Bitcoin (BTC) price are strongly influenced by the level of global geopolitical risk. Indeed, a number of well established stylized facts about BTC cease to be true when we condition the evolution of BTC returns on the GPR index. In particular, we find that when...

The increasing importance of commercial banks' noninterest-earning activities rendered conventional monetary policy relatively obsolete in the contemporary economy. It has been a long time since commercial banking was limited to bank lending activities. Indeed, it is now present in practically...

After two dramatic years for the banking sector, in particular after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in September 2008, 2009 signed an alt. The worst seems to have been avoided and the financial and banking sector is slowly recovering from one the major crisis since the Great Depression. The...

The employment protection legislation is not enforced uniformly both across and within countries. Among the others, the enforcement of regulation depends on the courts' actions and on the capacity of firms to escape legislation. We exploit the variation in courts' inefficiency across Italian...

We analyse the impact of Fair Trade and organic farming on a sample of Fair Trade rice producers in Thailand. We find that per capita income from agriculture is positively and significantly affected by organic certification and FT affiliation years. This effect does not translate into higher...