This paper investigates the incentives of experts competing to influence decision making. Competition for influence is shown to have an ambiguous effect on truthtelling incentives and a decision maker might be better off relying on one source of information only. This result has important...

This paper examines private equity and venture capital in Italy. The first part looks at the main features of the Italian market and its recent evolution; the second part considers the results of a survey of firms and intermediaries designed to gather information regarding contract features and...

This work investigates how fertility rates of working women have been influenced by employer characteristics (public versus private sector and small versus large firms) and features of the employment contracts using a representative sample of Italian working women in the last 30 years of the...

We investigate whether the shape of relations between banks and firms has had a detectable effect in mitigating the credit contraction that followed Lehman's default in September 2008. Using micro data on a large sample of Italian firms, we analyze the relation between firms' debt concentration...

This paper investigates whether competition affects the degree of optimism in recommendations on Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) issued by affiliated sell-side analysts. Competition is measured by the number of unaffiliated analysts covering the IPO. Since the measure of competition is likely to...

This work investigates both theoretically and empirically how the behaviour of financial analysts is affected by competition, measured as the strength of coverage of a stock from other analysts. The interaction among analysts and investors is modelled as a dynamic cheap talk game. The...

We study the effect of the increase in Italian sovereign debt risk on credit supply on a sample of 670,000 bank-firm relationships between December 2010 and December 2011, drawn from the Italian Central Credit Register. To identify a causal link, we exploit the lower impact of sovereign risk on...

This paper studies what impact liquidity shocks have on liquid assets and domestic and cross-border lending. In particular, we look for differences across banks depending on their international exposure and we account for the effects of the sovereign debt crisis and the ECB's non-conventional...

The entry of China into world markets has been one of the strongest recent shocks to world trade and advanced countries. industrial sectors. This is particularly true for Italy where labour-intensive, low-technology production represents a large share of output. Using Italian manufacturing...

In this paper we use a unique dataset of Italian manufacturing firms that includes firm-level price data to investigate whether increased penetration of Chinese products affects the competitive environment in an advanced country like Italy. Instrumenting import penetration from China to account...