This paper aims at investigating the relationship between firms' profit efficiency, access to finance and innovation activities. We enrich our understanding on firms' performance by adopting the stochastic frontier approach (SFA), which allows us to estimate profit functions and to obtain...

We perform a Meta-Regression Analysis (MRA) of the literature on government size and corruption, examining 450 empirical estimates retrieved from 44 primary papers published from 1998 to 2022. We find considerable heterogeneity in the results, mainly depending on whether the paper is published...

Constant Market Share Analysis (CMSA) is a method which decomposes the variation of market shares of any trader country. The more recent version is proposed by Fagerberg and Sollie (1985) that avoids some limits deriving from previously specifications. After explicating how CMSA works, this note...

This study presents a meta-regression analysis on the literature of courts efficiency. The metadata set comprises 264 efficiency scores retrieved from 36 papers published from 1992 to 2019. Our models explain a substantial proportion of both within- and between-study heterogeneity. Estimates...

Linking Managerial Behaviour to Cost and Profit Efficiency in the Banking Sectors of Central and Eastern European Countries This paper analyzes cost and profit efficiency as well as the managerial behaviour of banks in nine Central and Eastern European countries, providing cross-country and...

In this paper, we aim to assess how a specific socio-institutional environment, identified according to the level of corruption, may affect the access to credit for micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs). Using a sample of 68,115 observations - drawn from the ECB-SAFE survey -...

This paper investigates on the demographic, economic, political and cultural determinants of direct democracy in 87 countries using an index of direct democracy. The test is interesting since there are important variations across these countries in the referendum and initiative use. We apply a...

In the last two decades of the XIX century Italy became an industrial country. Historians maintain that this process was affected by the action of some interest groups that pursued both state protection from competition and specific public expenditure programs. Starting from the economic...

Based on the literature on public procurement regulation, we use an Agent-Based Model to assess the performance of different selection procedures. Specifically, we aim at investigating whether and how the inclusion of reputation of firms in the public procurement selection process affects the...

US voters have been moving apart in the last twenty years. This paper analyzes how their voting participation has partitioned by looking at US counties in the 2012 Presidential elections. To tackle this question, we propose a methodology that jointly addresses spatial autocorrelation of the...