In this paper we evaluate the effect of the presence of mafia organizations at local level through the estimation of a production function over a stratified sample of Italian firms. We find evidence of a negative impact on productivity, which is not significantly different between small and...

The aim of this paper is to evaluate whether domestic and foreign activities of Italian firms are mainly substitutes or complements. We take advantage of a unique firm-level panel data set from the Bank of Italy Survey of Industrial and Service Firms, which provides information on the...

In this paper we investigate whether new exporter firms have a higher probability of starting to export to the countries where their financing banks have already established their branches. The underlying mechanism we hypothesize is based on the transmission of foreign market knowledge from...