This paper uses the case of Italy to investigate the effects of local financial and socio-institutional development on productivity. The analysis employs firm-level productivity data and exploits variations in banking sector development, judicial enforcement, and social capital across Italian...

This study investigates employment growth in the business activities supported by the European Cohesion Policy. We examine cross-industry, cross-regional variations in a sample of fourteen manufacturing industries and seventy European regions (in Germany, Italy and Spain) and take advantage of...

There is a consensus that civil wars entail enormous economic costs, but we lack reliable estimates, due to the endogenous relationship between violence and socio-economic conditions. This paper measures the economic consequences of civil wars with the synthetic control method. This allows us to...

In this paper we investigate how tightening fiscal constraints (e.g., through intergovernmental transfer cuts) can lead local governments to postpone investments’ payments. We first provide a simple model showing how local governments can use arrears to relax their short-run financial...

Following Rajan and Zingales's (1998) pioneering study, many empirical studies have tested the differential growth effects of a country's financial development across various industries with different levels of dependence on external financing. To conduct this test, many researchers have used...

This paper investigates the effects of job insecurity on households' likelihood of experiencing financial distress. Households with less secure jobs are likely to experience drops in income more frequently than households with stable and well-protected jobs. Given imperfect financial markets and...

The paper reviews the literature on the evaluation of the macroeconomic of the EU Structural Funds and it focuses on the macroeconomic models used by the European Commission for the assessment of the Objective 1 Community and Structural Frameworks. It emerges that more detailed Structural Funds...

This paper investigates the relationship between bank concentration and the real economy by analyzing the number and average size of firms in manufacturing industries in two samples of countries with differing levels of economic development. We use a panel of 42 countries and 27 manufacturing...