In this paper we study technological progress in a set of representative Italian regions. The analysis is conducted using input-output data. We construct the technological frontiers and calculate new indices of technological progress (see Fredholm and Zambelli 2009 and Zambelli and Fredholm...

Do patents behave substantially like property rights in tangible assets, in that they encourage development and innovation? This article notes that historical evidence, cross-country evidence, economic experiments, and estimates of net benefits all indicate that general property rights...

The indigenous audit industries of most non-US/UK countries have confronted perceived market monopolization by the set of international ‘Big 4' firms which, at least outside the EU, may be regarded as ‘foreign firms'. The history of China's attempts over the last four decades at...

For capital markets to function, political institutions must support capitalism in general and the capitalism of financial markets in particular. Yet capital markets' shape, support, and extent are often contested in the polity. Powerful elements — from politicians to mass popular movements...

Strong financial markets are widely thought to propel economic development, with many in finance seeing legal tradition as fundamental to protecting investors sufficiently for finance to flourish. Kenneth Dam, in the Law-Growth Nexus, finds that the legal tradition view inaccurately portrays how...

Minority shareholdings have been on the regulatory agenda of competition authorities for some time. Recent empirical studies, however, draw attention to a new, thought provoking theory of harm: common ownership by institutional investors holding small, parallel equity positions in several...

Although twenty years have elapsed since the beginning of transition, Eastern European and Central Asian countries are still characterized by remarkably heterogeneous levels of economic development. In the light of the established causal relationship between finance and growth, we perform an...

This multilevel meta-analytic study, based on 176 studies from 36 countries, examines the impact of political characteristics on the performance of family firms when comparing them to non-family firms (k=311, N=1,598,964). Our findings support the expectation that family firm characteristics are...

Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) and Real Estate Operating Companies (REOCs) seem to have different systematic risk levels even though both invest almost exclusively in real estate-related assets. The findings indicate that business risk is negatively related to systematic risk, as measured...

This paper explores the effect of stock repurchase announcements on equity returns for publicly traded real estate investment trusts (REITs). In addition to providing analysis of the corporate decision to repurchase shares, the study of share repurchases in the context of REITs provides a novel...