Understanding the dynamics of the leverage ratio is at the heart of the empirical research about firms' capital structure, as they can be very different under alternative theoretical models. The pillars of almost all empirical applications are the maintained assumptions of poolability and...

The econometric literature on measuring returns on intangible capital is vast, but we still know little about the effects on productivity of different types of intellectual capital (R&D and patents) and customer capital (trademarks and advertising). The aim of this paper is to estimate the...

We exploit the new historical national accounts data for Italy over the period 1861-2010, built by Banca d'Italia and Istat, with the collaboration of the University of Rome "Tor Vergata". In the first part of the paper, a thorough study of the new data's statistical properties is presented...

The problem of instrument proliferation and its consequences (overfitting of endogenous variables, bias of estimates, weakening of Sargan/Hansen test) are well known. The literature provides little guidance on how many instruments is too many. It is common practice to report the instrument count...

We analyse how Pre-Trade Transparency (PTT) affects the behaviour of different stock traders. To do so, we exploit a natural experiment, that is the PTT change in the equity segment of Italian Stock Exchange (ISE) which occurred in July 2007, with the aim of reducing information asymmetries...

We present a parsimonious representation of debt-ratio dynamics that is able to nest the Trade-Off, Pecking-Order and Market-Timing theoretical models, at the same time avoiding the poolability of the slope parameters. The inference on the heterogeneous speed of adjustment of the firm towards...

My discussion is articulated in three main points. First, I propose to make MeMo-It the first fully open source Italian Macroeconomic Model; the enlargement of the model's users to those outside Istat would ease the interaction of ideas between researchers interested in the empirical aspects of...

The article investigates the relationship between GDP and prices in Italy in the long-run, from the country's Unification (1861) up to present day. By using the new national accounts data, over the period 1861–2012, we were able to make Italy the third country to have a historical test of the...

Theoretically, the effect on investment of uncertainty over the demand for a firm's product is unclear because of the influence of several factors, such as the production technology and the amount of competition in the product market. It has not been possible, until now, to investigate more...

The paper examines the size and productivity of total intangible capital relative to total tangible capital for a large panel of Italian Manufacturing firms. In the analysis, we decompose total intangibles in two different ways: in intangibles expensed in firms' current accounts (as usually...