The paper studies the motivations behind banks' shareholding of non-financial firms using a panel of large Italian companies in the period 1994-2000. Empirical evidence shows that banks are shareholders of companies that are less profitable, have experienced slower growth, are more indebted, are...

The author analyzes the firm optimal investment policy, assuming a pure increasing-returns-to-scale technology and adjustment costs. The existence of an optimal plan is proved by applying a new set of necessary and sufficient conditions for optimality. The analysis is carried out in a...

We analyze a class of binary dynamic models inspired by [4] on agents’ choices and social interaction. The main feature of our analysis is that agents are heterogeneous, in particular their attitude to interact with the choices of the other agents changes over time endogenously. Although...