Secondary data-set have come to play an increasing role in empirical economic research. This paper examines the major new secondary data-set assembled by Klaus Deininger and Lyn Squire and the World Bank. We concentrate on its coverage of the OECD countries. We have particularly in mind the user...

The banking industry is consolidating at an accelerating pace, yet not conclusive results have emerged on the benefits of mergers and acquisitions. We analyze the Italian market, which is similar to other main European countries.

This paper examines how firm characteristics, the legal system and financial development affect corporate finance decisions using a novel and unexpored data set containing balance sheet information for listed and unlisted companies. Contrary to the previous literature, by using data on unlisted...

This paper proposes a signaling model of fiscal stabilizations that offers a new perspective on why governments deviate from optimal tax smoothing. In our model, dependable -but not fully credible- governments have an incentive to tighten the fiscal regime when the signaling effect on credit...

This work provides an empirical analysis of the development of Italian provinces over the period 1952-1992, investigating the existence of convergence and/or divergence processes, identifying groups of provinces characterised by similar growth patterns and examining the role played by various...

Post-war Italy provides an interesting case to test for recent contributions on economic growth which play down the relevance of physical capital per se and stress its complementarity with infrastructure and less tangible factors such as finance and human capital. In truth, behind the remarkable...

The process through which economic policy is conceived and decided cannot be simply described as the optimisation of a well-defined loss function s ubject to the constraints provided by a model of the economy. Even egnoring the forbidding difficulties of eliciting a stable and explicit loss...

In the case of the consumer price index the importance of a seasonally adjusted measure lies in the possibility of promptly identifying turning points in inflation. The focus of this paper is the so-called "cost-of-living" index, the most used measure of Italian inflation. Our aim is to identify...