We analyze empirically the impact of urban agglomeration on Italian wages. Using micro-data from the Bank of Italy's Survey of Household Income and Wealth for the years 1995, 1998, 2000 and 2002 on more than 22,000 employees distributed in 242 randomly drawn local labor markets (30 percent of...

This paper offers a micro-founded general definition of poverty set in the context of utility theory. Poverty and non-poverty are described as two structurally different types of local non-satiation: the former entails a strong need for further consumption and social marginalization, the latter...

The analysis of the determinants and the effects on firm performance of venture capital finance for a sample of Italian enterprises indicates that small, young and more innovative firms are more likely to be financed by a venture capitalist. Our results confirm that venture capital can help...

This paper documents the existence of a significant forecast error on crude oil futures. We interpret it as a risk premium, which, in part, could have been explained by means of a real-time US business cycle indicator, such as the degree of capacity utilization in manufacturing. This result is...

We study the dynamics of risk premiums on the German bond market, employing no-arbitrage term-structure models with both observable and unobservable state variables, recently popularized by Ang and Piazzesi (2003). We conduct a specification analysis based on a new canonical representation for...

The paper examines various tests for assessing whether a time series model requires a slope component. We first consider the simple t-test on the mean of first differences and show that it achieves high power against the alternative hypothesis of a stochastic nonstationary slope as well as...

Using several data sources, we assess the impact of Italy's outward foreign direct investment (FDI) on local employment growth between 1996 and 2001 for 12 manufacturing industries and 103 administrative provinces. Our main result is that, controlling for the local industrial structure and area...

This paper presents a panel of internationally comparable Gini coefficients, based on the United Nations University/World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU/WIDER) World Income Inequality Database (WIID) version 1.0. The 221 data points that match minimum requirements of spatial...

The question addressed by this study is whether consumers remember past prices correctly. We test Italian citizens' memory for cinema prices with questionnaires distributed to moviegoers. The analysis concentrates on the memory of pre-euro prices, but the recall for a more recent period is also...

In this paper we use data from the Bank of Italy's Survey on Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) to study what Italian households think of tax evasion, and to estimate their propensity to evade taxes. This propensity turns out to be larger for the self-employed than for employees; within the...