It is widely accepted that in liberalized electricity markets log-returns display fat-tailed densities. Besides qualitative assessments, so far precise characterizations of the shape of the distribution have been seldom provided. In this work, we characterize the conditional and unconditional...

Harberger's "A Vision of the Growth Process", Presidential Address at the 1998 Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association, provides evidence that contributions to aggregate real cost reduction (RCR) are concentrated in a small number of industries. According to Harberger, this is...

This paper reviews the empirical evidence of the financial sources used by technology-based small firms (TBSFs) in Europe. We shed light on cross-country differences and similarities in the capital structures of TBSFs, in the organization and dynamics of the venture capital industries and...

This paper shows that the available stylized facts on productivity dynamics, such as persistent cross-sectoral heterogeneity, do not allow to solve an identification problem regarding the impact of common drivers - such as General Purpose Technologies (GPTs) - on economic growth. The evidence of...

This paper shows that the available stylized facts on productivity dynamics, such as persistent cross-sectoral heterogeneity, do not allow to solve an identification problem regarding the impact of common drivers - such as General Purpose Technologies (GPTs) - on economic growth. The evidence of...

In uniform price, sealed-bid day-ahead electricity auctions, the market price is set at the intersection between aggregate demand and supply functions built by a market operator. Each day, just one agent - the marginal generator - owns the market-clearing plant. Day-ahead auctions are moreover...

In this paper, we study the growth rates of 4-digit sectors in U.S. manufacturing. Two measures of size (value of shipments, value added) are considered, for each of the 38 years (1959-1996) of a sample of 458 4-digit sectors, drawn from the NBER Manufacturing Productivity database. Whole sample...

The evidence of volatility-price dependence observed in previous works (Karakatsani and Bunn 2004; Bottazzi, Sapio and Secchi 2005; Simonsen 2005) suggests that there is more to volatility than simply spikes. Volatility is found to be positively correlated with the lagged price level in settings where...

This paper contributes to characterizing the probability density of the price returns in some European day-ahead electricity markets (NordPool, APX, Powernext) by fitting some flexible and general families of distributions, such as the alpha-stable, Normal Inverse Gaussian (NIG), Exponential...