Start-ups increasingly find the prospect of university-industry collaborations to be a powerful driver of innovation and entrepreneurship activity. Moreover, at the geographical level, they are attracted by teaching and research institutions, either public or private. This paper focuses on the...

The paper analyzes the role of guarantees on loan interest rates before and during the recent financial crisis in Italian firm financing. The paper improves on existing literature by distinguishing between real and personal guarantees. Further, the paper investigates the potential different role...

This paper analyzes the joint impact of tax evasion and the inefficiency of the legal system on firms’ financial constraints. We find that both variables have a statistically significant effect on the difficulties that firms encounter when trying to access financing and this effect is...

This paper investigates the impact of the interaction between product, labor and financial market imperfections on firms’ investment by using a panel data of European firms over the period 1994-2008. It studies the impact of product and labor market regulations on firm investment and how it...

This paper aims at analysing whether banking changes that occurred in Italy in the last fifteen years have mined the soundness of its financial system. We look for potential threats to financial stability as a result of the dynamic behaviour of Italian banks that progressively have been...

This paper aims at analyzing the impact of Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) on frms' investment policies in the presence of financial imperfections. Our results show that investment is positively correlated to measures of internal funds available to firms and negatively to the level of...

This paper aims at shedding light on the influence of guarantees on the loan pricing. After reviewing the literature on the role of guarantees in bank lending decisions, we estimate a bank interest rate model that explicitly includes collateral and personal guarantees as explanatory variables....

Traditionally female entrepreneurs report difficulties or higher costs in accessing bank credit. These difficulties can be either the result of supply side discrimination, or the lower profitability of female-owned firms than male-owned ones. This paper aims at analyzing gender differences in...

This paper analyses how financial and labor market imperfections jointly influence investment. The contemporaneous presence of imperfections in both markets gives rise to a negative correlation between EPL and investment: firms facing negative shocks see their financial constraints worsen in...