This study examines the effect of the hardening of the budget constraint on the investment behaviour of Italian state owned enterprises (SOEs). It carries out a natural experiment that exploits the 1987 shift of budget regimes due to the pressure of European Union economic policies on the...

This paper contributes to the literature on the role of decentralization in hardening the budget constraint of public enterprises. Following Qian and Roland the study adopts a ‘federalist’ approach. However, it interprets federalism as the upward devolution of domestic economic policies to a...

Using a new data source on share price indices, this paper finds no evidence that the substantial variations in the reactions to the crash of October 1987 across countries are related to the structure of markets. However, trading halts and capital controls on residents may have moderated the...