To assess the life-cycle welfare effects of pension reforms, we provide a dynamic stochastic model of saving, portfolio choice and retirement with a pension system that operates according to the notional defined contribution principle.Relying on the exogenous variation from a sequence of Italian...

We study the opinions on prostitution that emerged from the World Value Survey. We show that individuals tends to justify prostitution more in countries where it is legal or regulated and less in countries where it is prohibited, even after controlling for religious, cultural and sociological...

This paper investigates the importance of accessing public capital markets through an initial public offering (IPO), and the consequent relaxation of firms’ financial constraints, for firm-level long term employment decisions. We find that firms significantly increase post-IPO investment in...

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...

Recent cases in the US (Meritor, Eisai) and in the EU (Intel ) have revived the debate on the use of price-cost tests in loyalty discount cases. We draw on existing recent economic theories of exclusion and develop new formal material to argue that economics alone does not justify applying a...

Exploiting matched employer-employee data merged with information on the ownership structure of business groups, we document that French groups actively operate Internal Labor Markets (ILMs). For the average group-affiliated firm, the probability to absorb a worker previously employed in its...

In this paper we review household saving and debt trends in Italy. We summarize the available empirical evidence on Italians' motives to save, relying on macroeconomic indicators and data drawn from the Bank of Italy's Surveys of Household Income and Wealth from 1984 to 2012. The macroeconomic...