We investigate the role of workers’ and managerial experience as a determinant of firm innovation and productivity in a sample of about ten thousands Italian firms. A high share of temporary – thus un-experienced - workers is associated to low innovation and productivity. The effect of...

The problem of absenteeism has taken the centre of the stage of public attention when Renato Brunetta, the Public Employment Secretary, launched a reform of the public sector which started with a law on absenteeism. After the law was passed, the first evidence collected showed an average drop of...

We derive the distribution of a proxy for the risk tolerance in a representative sample of US households. Our measure is deduced from the willingness to bear risk as indicated by the variance of returns of each household’s observed portfolio. The estimates, obtained assuming constraints on...

Using a longitudinal data set of balance sheets of 504 nonprofit and for-profit firms operating in the social residential sector in Italy, we investigate the relation between capital structure and type of enterprise. The nondistribution constraint typical of nonprofit organizations rises the...

In this paper we propose a moral hazard model to illustrate a credit crunch scenario. A firm is denied the access to bank funding due to high informational or monitoring costs that the bank must pay to induce the firm to behave. This is likely to happen in periods of recession, when trust...

In this paper we apply a real-option model to study how tax rate uncertainty affects a firm's decisions about both the timing and the source of finance of an investment project. We show that debt finance (i) encourages entry and (ii) mitigates the e¤ect of tax rate uncertainty on entry timing.

We explore the relationship between litigation rates and the number of lawyers, in a typical supplier-induced demand (SID) frame. Drawing on an original panel dataset for the 169 Italian courts of justice between 2000 and 2007, we first document that the number of lawyers is positively...

In some countries reforms of public service provision have been accompanied by a parallel process of devolution. However, the application of fiscal federalism has not always produced the desired effects. We argue that this result may depend on two factors: a) a lack of coordination causing a...

We provide a general framework in which to determine the optimal penalty fee inducing the contractor to respect the contracted delivery date in public procurement contracts (PPCs). We do this by developing a real option model that enables us to investigate the contractor’s value of investment...

In this article, we analyze Auerbach's (1991) proposal of a retrospective capital gains tax, which is equivalent to an accrual tax on an ex-ante basis. Using a continuous-time model with stochastic interest rates and serially correlated asset returns, we prove that such an equivalence still...