The The standard Real Business Cycle literature mainly focuses on Walrasian models designed to fit the US institutional framework. Differences between the US and Europe, mostly evident in the labor market, suggest that a purely Walrasian model may be inappropriate to study European business...

How can laboratory experiments help us understand banking crises, including the usefulness of various policy responses? After giving a concise introduction to the field of experimental economics more generally, I attempt to provide answers. I discuss methodological issues and survey relevant...

Motivated by dynamic asset pricing, we extend the dual pairs?theory of Dieudonné(1942) and Mackey (1945) to pairs of modules over a Dedekind complete f-algebra with multiplicative unit. The main tools are: a Hahn-Banach Theorem for modules of this kind; a topology on the f-algebra that has the...

The hot hand fallacy has long been considered a massive and widespread cognitive illusion with important economic consequences. While the canonical domain of the fallacy is basketball, which continues to provide its strongest and most readily generalizable supporting evidence, the fallacy has...

A common explanation for African current underdevelopment is the extractive character of institutions established during the colonial period. Yet, since colonial extraction is hard to quantify, its precise mecha- nisms and magnitude are still unclear. In this paper, I tackle these issues by...

Experimental evidence suggests that agents in social dilemmas have belief-dependent, other-regarding preferences. But in experimental games such preferences cannot be common knowledge, because subjects play with anonymous co-players. We address this issue theoretically and experimentally in the...

Severe economic downturns, characterized by deleverage, are typically preceeded by phenomena of debt overhang. This evidence suggests that large recessions may not be the result of large shocks, but, rather, of the interaction between typical shocks and the current state of the economy. We study...

Exploiting the timing of the 2005-2006 Italian bankruptcy law reforms, we disentangle the effects of reorganization and liquidation in bankruptcy on bank financing nd firm investment. A 2005 reform introduces reorganization procedures facilitating loan renegotiation. The 2006 reform subsequently...

We build a model of a limit order book and examine the consequences of adding a dark pool. Starting with an illiquid book, we show that book and consolidated ?ll rates and volume increase, but the spread widens, depth declines and welfare deteriorates. When book liquidity increases, more orders...

Understanding the dynamics of the leverage ratio is at the heart of the empirical research about firms' capital structure, as they can be very different under alternative theoretical models. The pillars of almost all empirical applications are the maintained assumptions of poolability and...