In this paper we present a new theory accounting for the heterogeneous impact of family firms on economic growth. We develop an overlapping generations model, where agents are heterogeneous in innate talent, and family firms have access to an additional source of managerial capital, family...

The evolution of the banking industry has always been affected by recurrent waves of technological, regulatory and organizational changes. All such changes have significant effects on the spatial organization of banks, the interconnectedness of geographical credit markets and the core-periphery...

In this paper we empirically test the recent lender-based theory for the use of collateral in bank lending. Based on a proprietary dataset of loan contracts written by a local bank in competitive credit markets, we use the physical proximity between borrowers and the lending branch of the bank...

A recent debate in the forecasting literature revolves around the inability of macroecono-metric models to improve on simple univariate predictors, since the onset of the so-called Great Moderation. This paper explores the consequences of equilibrium indeterminacy for quantitative forecasting...

We present a case study analysis of the impact of coups d'état on defence spending. We use the synthetic control method and compare the evolution of the defence burden for countries affected by coups with the evolution of an artificial control group. We find that successful coups determine a...

We use responses to survey questions in the 2010 Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth that ask consumers how much of an unexpected transitory income change they would consume. We find that the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) is 48 percent on average, and that there is substantial...

When do principals independently choose to share the information obtained from their privately informed agents? Information sharing affects contracting within competing organizations and induces agents’ strategies to be correlated through the distortions imposed by principals to obtain...

The great interest into hierarchical optimization problems and the increasing use of game theory in many economic or engineering applications led to investigate optimization problems with constraints described by the solutions to a quasi-variational inequality (variational problems having...

In this paper we test the nexus between financial development and economic growth upon territorially highly disaggregated data from Italy, paying particular attention to the role of market power of local banks and cooperative banks. Profit efficiency, computed using the so-called “true...

Motivated by the recent experimental evidence on altruistic behavior, we study a simple principal-agent model where each player cares about other players’ utility, and may reciprocate their attitude towards him. We show that, relative to the selfish benchmark, efficiency improves when players...