We construct a comprehensive panel data of 96 publicly traded European utilities over the period 1994-2005 in order to study the relationship between the capital structure of regulated firms, regulated prices, and investments, and examine if and how this interaction is affected by ownership...

This paper studies the effect of the hardening of the budget constraint on the behaviour of public enterprises. Drawing from finance theory, we provide empirical evidence of a change in behaviour of public enterprises between soft and hard budget constraint regimes by investigating the financial...

Building on the current theory of industrial concentration, we analyze the relation between market size and product differentiation, and show how product differentiation impacts market share turbulence. Our basic results highlight that in markets where vertical product differentiation dominates,...

We investigate whether the diffusion of Airbnb reduces or exacerbates the differences between central and suburban areas by affecting residential property values. We leverage on the strong heterogeneity of five Italian cities in terms of tourist vocation, local housing markets and socio-economic...

We study whether the personal interactions between buyers and sellers may bias the rating scores left by reviewers on digital platforms and affect consumer demand. Using data and text reviews from Airbnb in Barcelona in 2019, we perform semantic and regression analyses to measure the host’s...

Drawing on the knowledge-based view of the firm, we investigate whether firm performance is related to the accumulated stock of technological knowledge associated with the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), and what contextual factors affect this relationship. We test our research questions on...

The conflict of interest between shareholders in insider-dominated firms generates the agency problem of profit diversion, which intensifies when the controlling shareholder is the CEO. In a theoretical model, we show that incentive contracts can be employed to discipline diversion, and how they...

The authors present an original attempt to trace the changing industrial and geographical diversification strategy of firms along the integration process. The analysis is based on a unique database covering the product and geographical scope of the leading European firms in the manufacturing...

Following the idea that adverse macroeconomic shocks to the economy worsen agency problems between borrowers and lenders, this paper presents empirical evidence that small and large firms react differently to monetary tightening. We use aggregate annual balance sheet data for two subsamples of...