Recent economic literature indicates that imperfections in the credit market can amplify business fluctuations causing financial fragility. Starting from the framework of Greenwald and Stiglitz (1993) and Delli Gatti et al. (2005), we make a more careful model of the banking sector in Italy and...

In this paper we analyze the size distribution of Italian firms by age. In other words, we want to establish whether the way that the size of firms is distributed varies as firms become old. As a proxy of size we use capital. In [L.M.B. Cabral, J. Mata, On the evolution of the firm size...

The aim of this paper is to empirically validate the agent-based macroeconomic model of Gaffeo et al. [2008]. We show that the microsimulated version of the model is able to replicate actual data with a satisfactory degree of precision. From a theoretical point of view, our validation approach...

In this paper we analyze the upper tail of the size distribution of Italian companies with limited liability belonging to the CEBI database. Size is defined in terms of net worth.

We discuss a special Pólya lattice model to study cascading failures of firms in a simple industrial economy. In particular, every firm is represented by a Pólya-like urn, whose reinforcement is function of time, of the neighboring urns and their compositions, and of a random variable...

Using a large industrial panel, we show that the size distribution of Italian manufacturing firms can be well approximated by a two-parameter generalized Pareto distribution (GPD); the fitting is particularly good for medium-large companies. This evidence seems to hold using different proxies of...

In this paper we deal with the validation of an agent-based model and, in particular, with the technical validation process, that is to say all the set of test and methods used to analyze if the results of a simulation agree with reality. Today, thanks to some important studies, validation...

We introduce a new intuitive approach to generalized extreme shock models (GESM) using urn processes. This allows us to indirectly model the moving risky threshold of generalized extreme shock models introduced in [Gut, A., Hsler, J., 2005. Realistic variation of shock models. Statistics &...