The lag in innovation in Italy vis-à-vis the other main industrial countries is one of the effects of the fragmentation of the production system into many small firms that have trouble bearing the high cost of R&D and taking the related risks. Such other causes as shortages in human capital for...

This paper evaluates the causal effect of issuing equities on the probability that a firm will engage in R&D activity. Equity is a preferable source of external finance for innovation than debt. It does not require collateral, does not exacerbate moral hazard problems connected with the...

This report analyses the main developments in housing finance in the euro area in the decade, covering the period from 1999 to 2007. It looks at mortgage indebtedness, various characteristics of loans for house purchase, the funding of such loans and the spreads between the interest rates on...

Poverty is generally defined as income or expenditure insufficiency, but the economic condition of a household also depends on its real and financial asset holdings. This paper investigates measures of poverty that rely on indicators of household net worth. We review and assess two main...

This paper focuses on debt maturity of nonpublic Italian firms of small and medium size by international standards and that mainly use bank loans as source of external financing. Compared to few similar studies, the main contributions are that panel estimations allow to control for unobserved...

In the absence of correlation between net wealth and entrepreneurial talent or risk aversion, net wealth should have an explanatory power in the decision of becoming entrepreneurs only for households that are financially constrained. Further, the importance of net wealth should be higher for the...

Small firms encounter difficulties in collecting external finance due to greater information problems. For small innovative firms, whose activity is more difficult to evaluate, the cost of external finance could be even higher. This paper aims to shed light on special features in financial...