"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...

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 problem of instrument proliferation and its consequences (overfitting of the endogenous explanatory variables, biased IV and GMM estimators, weakening of the power of the overidentification tests) are well known. This paper introduces a statistical method to reduce the instrument count. The...

Macroeconomic uncertainty consists of three components: the unobservable, the heterogeneous and the "uncertain". We are unaware of exactly when economic agents perceive uncertainty and which type of uncertainty interests them. This paper introduces and outlines a way of conducting large-scale...

In this paper, we model business investment distinguishing between ICT (communication equipment, hardware and software) and Non-ICT (machinery and equipment, and nonresidential buildings) components and taking into account asset specific characteristics potentially affecting the reactivity of...

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...

The preliminary evidence in the literature suggests that changes in uncertainty have a role in shaping the U.S. economic cycle. But what is effectively measured by the different available indicators of uncertainty still remains an "uncertain" issue. This paper has two aims: (i) to introduce a...