During the first half of the 1990s a pool of Italian judges carried out an investigation, named Mani Pulite (literally clean hands), that led many public officials to be prosecuted and convicted because of bribery and embezzlement. The impact of Mani Pulite was so much influential that since...

We derive the optimal principal-supervisor-agent relationship in an incomplete contract setting. We show that while having a three-layer structure with full separation of tasks has no efficiency consequence under a complete contract, it becomes crucial under an incomplete contract and can even...

After an auction, a losing bidder can purchase the prize from the winner. We show why a strong bidder may prefer to drop out of the auction before the price has reached her valuation, and acquire the prize in the aftermarket: a strong bidder may be in a better bargaining position in the...

We search for the circumstances in which the response of national saving to fiscal policy contradicts conventional Keynesian predictions, using data from 18 OECD countries. The data suggest that non-Keynesian effects tend to be associated with large and persistent fiscal impulses. Such responses...

The Survey on illegal migration in Italy (SIMI henceforth) aims to analyse the phenomenon of clandestines migrating to or through Italy. SIMI contains information concerning the main demographic, economic and social characteristics of a sample of 920 clandestines crossing Italian borders and...

Recent work documents that better legal institutions are associated with broader equity markets. We investigate whether international differences in legal institutions also help explain the international cross-section of expected stock returns. We document three main regularities. First, total...

This paper analyses the effect of the degree of the legal enforcement of credit contracts on the level of private investment. We use a model of corporate finance with moral hazard and collateralized asset. We introduce in the model a third agent: the government, which is responsible for the...

In a world where some consumers are not self-interested and the action of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) reveals information, the price of a good produced by a multinational enterprise and the latter's relocation and production decisions depend on labor standards. We study the effect of...

We study the efficiency of the equilibrium price in a centralized, order-driven market where asymmetrically informed traders are active for several periods and can observe each other current and past orders, as in electronic systems of trading. We show that the more precise the information the...

MinSup problems with constraints described by quasi-equilibrium problems are considered in Banach spaces. The solutions set of such problems may be empty even in very good situations, so the aim of this paper is twofold. First, we determine appropriate regularizations which allow to...