This paper takes advantage of the COVID-19 outbreak to explore the determinants of firms' R&D choices around an exogenous shock. We make use of unique panel data on 7,800 Italian companies between January 2020 - right before the pandemic - and March of the same year - amid lockdown policies. We...

The lack of information is a relevant obstacle to the export activity of small and medium enterprises. This paper analyzes whether banks can support firms' export by reducing informational asymmetries about foreign markets. We exploit a large sample of Italian firms for which we merge custom...

We test whether financial fluctuations affect firms' decisions, through their impact on banks' cost of funding. We exploit two shocks to Italian bank CDS spreads and equity valuations: the 2007-2009 financial crisis and the 2010-2012 sovereign debt crisis. Using newly available data linking over...

We investigate the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the role played by credit constraints in the transmission mechanism, using a novel survey of expectations and plans of Italian firms, taken just before and after the outbreak. Most firms revise downward their expectations for...

We study the effects on financial markets and real economic activity of changes in risk related to political events and policy announcements in Italy during the 2013-2019 period that saw the rise to power of populist parties. We focus on events that have implications for budgetary policy, debt...

This paper explores how value-chain governance affects the innovation performance of suppliers of intermediate products. We take advantage of a unique dataset of Italian firms to identify governance regimes along suppliers’ technological capabilities and the level of explicit coordination in...

This paper documents the link between finance and informal competition. Using longitudinal firm-level data, we show that formal firms that are more exposed to the competition of informal firms are less likely to apply for a bank loan. This result is not due to sample selection, omitted variable...

We estimate the labor market power of over 13,000 manufacturing establishments across 82 low and middle-income countries around the world. Within local labor markets, larger and more productive firms have higher wage markdowns and pay lower wages. Labor market power across countries exhibits a...