What are the socioeconomic effects of foreign aid in developing countries? How effective is aid in promoting social capital? The paper focuses on these questions from an empirical perspective and assesses the casual effect of foreign aid on trust in Uganda. Individuals living in counties that...

We test whether financial fluctuations affect firmsÕ decisions through their impact on banksÕ cost of funding. We exploit two shocks to Italian banksÕ CDS spreads and equity valuations: the 2007Ð 2009 financial crisis and the 2010Ð2012 sovereign debt crisis. Using newly available data...

This paper shows that the result implied by the Redux model of Obstfeld and Rogoff (1995) - that the exchange rate depreciates in response to balanced-budget fiscal expansions - is completely reversed once we account for two key features of modern New Open Economy Macroeconomics models: home...

We assess the perception of professional forecasters regarding the effectiveness of unconventional monetary policy measures undertaken by the U.S. Federal Reserve after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Using individual survey data, we analyse the changes in forecasting of bond yields around the...

Financial frictions represent a severe obstacle to firmsÕ innovativeness. This paper shows the existence and quantifies the effects of financial barriers to the innovation propensity of Italian SMEs. Employing direct measures of financial constraints and a credit-score estimated ad hoc, I find...

This paper investigates the effectiveness of forward guidance for the central banks of four countries: New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the United States. We test whether forward guidance improved market participantsÕ ability to forecast future short-term and long-term rates. We find some...

Recent innovations have made it feasible to transfer private digital currency without the intervention of an institution. A digital currency must prevent users from spending their balances more than once, which is easier said than done with purely digital currencies. Current digital currencies...

In this paper we explore the effects of bank-borrower physical proximity on price and non-price aspects of small business lending in local credit markets. Along the price dimension, our analysis reveals that interest rates increase with bank-borrower distance and decrease with the distance...

In this paper we look at the effect of International Monetary Fund (IMF) lending programs on banking crises in a large sample of developing countries, over the period 1965-2010. The endogeneity of the Fund intervention is addressed by adopting an instrumental variable (IV) strategy, in which the...

I study predictability and financial integration for the excess returns on ten emerging and U.S. industrial stock markets. Firstly, I examine one-factor and multi-factor linear models in a static context. I focus on the explanatory power of some common, macro, and artificial global risk factors....