The quality of governance crucially affects corporate outcomes, and may be particularly important for state-owned enterprises (SOEs) not disciplined by market competition forces. We examine the impact of board composition on the performance of companies controlled by public entities in Italy....

This paper examines how the size of the corporate directors' labor market affects board appointments in Italian private limited liability firms. As an exogenous shock to a firm's access to potential non-local directors, we exploit the gradual expansion of the high-speed railway network that...

We examine how the size of the corporate directors' labor market affects the quality of board appointments in Italian private firms. To establish the causality of the relationship, we exploit exogenous variations in firms' access to non-local potential directors following the gradual...

We explore the role of ownership, governance and management characteristics as potential drivers of the performance gaps between firms located in the Centre and North and in the South of Italy. First, we document that southern firms are characterized by more frequent family ownership and a...