This paper analyses whether the strengthening of intellectual property rights (IPRs) systems affects decisions of cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As), and whether their influence is different for developed and developing countries and across industrial sectors. We estimate an extended...

This paper explores the statistical properties of household consumption-expenditure budget share distributions — defined as the share of household total expenditure spent for purchasing a specific category of commodities — for a large sample of Italian households in the period 1989-2004. We...

This paper begins to explore the determinants of the topological properties of the international - trade network (ITN). We fit bilateral-trade flows using a standard gravity equation to build a “residual” ITN where trade-link weights are depurated from geographical distance, size, border...

We propose a refinement of the criterion by Bai and Ng [2002] for determining the number of static factors in factor models with large datasets. It consists in multiplying the penalty function times a constant which tunes the penalizing power of the function itself as in the Hallin and Lika...

We test the importance of multivariate information for modelling and forecasting inflation's conditional mean and variance. In the literature, the existence of inflation's conditional heteroskedasticity has been debated for years, as it seemed to appear only in some datasets and for some lag...

Estimating the response of hours worked to technology shocks is often considered as a crucial step for evaluating the applicability of macroeconomic models to reality. In particular, Galí [1999] has considered the conditional correlation between employment and productivity as a key tool for...