Departing from the traditional approach to modeling an agent who finds it difficult to make clear-cut comparisons between alternatives, we introduce the notion of graded preferences: Given two alternatives, the agent reports a number between 0 and 1, which reflects her inclination to prefer the...

We analyze theoretically banks’ choice of organizational structures in branches or subsidiaries in the presence of government bailouts, default costs and - possibly - economies of scale as sources of financial synergies. We compare with stand-alone banks. Subsidiary and branch structures...

A new generation of studies has called into question standard microeconomic predictions of a positive association between women's economic independence and union dissolution, suggesting that it is necessary to include information about both partners' contributions to paid and unpaid work when...

One of the main objectives of empirical analysis of experiments and quasi-experiments is to inform policy decisions that determine the allocation of treatments to individuals with different observable covariates. We propose the Empirical Welfare Maximization (EWM) method, which estimates a...

This paper proposes an intuitive definition of status quo that is model-free and given in terms of observable choices only. We do not rationalize status quo-dependent preferences, to the contrary, we show that models of decision under ambiguity already predict behavioral phenomena ascribed to...

This paper studies the pricing implications of the sole ambiguity aversion, in a Lucas’ tree economy where asset returns are ambiguous. Abstracting from a specific functional form, we disentangle the model-specific effect from the effect of ambiguity aversion. In addition, we allow the...

This paper explores the link between accountability, corruption and efficiency in the context of a career concern model where politically con- nected local monopolies are in charge of the provision of a local public service. We fi?nd that both corruption and a low degree of accountabil- ity...

The goal of this paper (in Italian) is to assess the impact of consumers’ incentives to building renovations – introduced in Italy in 1997 by means of tax reimbursements – on construction sector’s economic activity. Our analysis – which absent any sectional variability in the policy...

This study explains the emergence of the Sicilian mafia in the XIX century as the product of the interaction between natural resource abundance and weak institutions. We advance the hypothesis that the mafia emerged after the collapse of the Bourbon Kingdom in a context characterized by a severe...

The general elections held in February 2013 marked an earthquake in Italian politics. The two coalitions on the center-left and center-right that had governed Italy alternately between 1996 and 2011 together lost 11 million votes compared to the 2008 elections. The explanations advanced for this...