The paper investigates whether social capital can affect the standard living of the Italian households based on poverty and social exclusion. The analysis is developed at the regional level through cross-sections based in the year 2002 and in the year 2003. The indices of social capital that we...

In the last 20 years, social capital, has been evoked in several field of social science research and used to explain a vast range of phenomena: political participation, institution performance, corruption, economic success of countries and so on. Unfortunately, dealing with social capital at a...

Using high frequency data for the price dynamics of equities we measure the impact that market microstructure noise has on estimates of the: (i) volatility of returns; and (ii) variance-covariance matrix of n. assets. We propose a Kalman-filter-based methodology that allows us to deconstruct...

The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First we show how to estimate the volatility of high frequency log-returns where the estimates are not affected by microstructure noise and the presence of Lévy-type jumps in prices. The second contribution focuses on the relationship between the...