We compare characteristics of cooperative and non cooperative banks at world level in a time spell including the global financial crisis. Cooperative banks have higher net loans/total assets ratio, lower income from non traditional activites and lower shares of derivatives over total assets than...

The primary objective of this paper is to propose two nonlinear extensions for macroeconomic forecasting using large datasets. First, we propose an alternative technique for factor estimation, i.e., kernel principal component analysis, which allows the factors to have a nonlinear relationship to...

During the last thirty years most OECD countries have accumulated large public debts. The same period has been characterized by a considerable increase in the concentration of income at the top of the distribution and by substantial cuts to taxation imposed on high incomes. The paper argues that...

We analyse the impact of the introduction of the French Tobin tax on volumes, liquidity and volatility of affected stocks with parametric and non parametric tests on individual stocks, difference in difference tests and other robustness checks controlling for simultaneous month-of-the-year and...

This paper analyzes the role of complexity in production on the level of output and on its rate of growth. We develop an endogenous growth model with human capital accumulation, where increased complexity could exert either a positive or a negative effect on the level of output but always a...

This paper aims at evaluating the impact of 1998 Chinese health care reform on out-of-pocket expenditure and on saving. Existing evidence on the results achieved by this reform in terms of reduction of out-of-pocket medical expenditures is still mixed and contradictory, and very little is known...

This paper investigates the impact of the public smoking ban which came into effect in Italy on January 2005 on individual smoking behaviour. Current empirical evidence supports the existence of a negative effect of the Italian ban on smoking prevalence and consumption in the general population....

We investigate the relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility (hereafter CSR) and I/B/E/S analysts' earnings per share (EPS) forecasts using a large sample of US firms for the 1992-2011 period. Based on literature findings we decompose the CSR effect into four factors: accounting...

We examine the historical dynamics of government debt in post-unification Italy, from 1861 to 2009. Unit root tests for the debt-GDP ratio are unable to reject either the non-stationarity or the stationarity null hypothesis. Controlling debt dynamics for fiscal feedback policies of the...

Many papers have highlighted that some macroeconomic time series present structural instability. The causes of these remarkable changes in the reduced form properties of the macroeconomy is a debated argument. In literature this issue is handled with three main econometric methodologies:...