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Retail investors pay over twice as much attention to local companies than non-local ones, based on Google searches. News volume and volatility amplify this attention gap. Attention appears causally related to perceived proximity: first, acquisition by a nonlocal company is associated with less attention by locals, and more by nonlocals close to the acquirer; second, COVID-19 travel restrictions correlate with a drop in relative attention to nonlocal companies, especially in locations with fewer flights after the outbreak. Finally, local attention predicts volatility, bid-ask spreads and nonlocal attention, not viceversa. These findings are consistent with local investors having an information-processing advantage.

According to the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship (kste), a large part of the new knowledge created within universities is not valorised in the market due to the presence of a «knowledge filter», i.e. the lack of capabilities of translating new ideas into business opportunities. One of the keys to overcoming this «knowledge filter» is the entrepreneurial activity of graduates that embody the new knowledge. The paper aims at analysing the link between the flow of university graduates per year and the creation of new ventures at the local level in Italy. The paper distinguishes between graduates in humanities and in scientific and technical fields and considers the characteristics of local systems. We estimate the coefficients using the two-step gmm system estimator. Our empirical analysis does not confirm the main evidence in the literature: the flow of graduates does not have a positive impact on the entrepreneurial rates. If we consider the high-tech entrepreneurship, the flow of graduates from technology fields does not affect the entrepreneurial dynamics in high tech sectors, which implies that there is no direct link between the field of study of new graduates and the sector of activity of new companies. This could mean that it is university education per se that matters rather than a specific field of knowledge of educated people.

Taking advantage of the normative incoherence between the Italian VAT (IVA) regime that allows the galleries not to declare the VAT and the ARR regime that requires the galleries to calculate the ARR (DDS) on the price net of VAT, our work obtains private information on the mark-up of Italian art galleries. The determinants of mark-up, divided into gallery and artist specific determinants, reveal the main market strategies used by Italian galleries in the period considered.

This study analyzes the effectiveness of the Market Abuse Directive (MAD) in reducing possible profits from insider trading during voluntary tender offers with the purpose of delisting initiated by controlling shareholders. Exploiting the quasi-experimental setting provided by the introduction of the MAD, our event-study analysis on the Italian market suggests that the new regulation did not produce appreciable effects on the magnitude of abnormal returns and volumes noted before the announcement of a tender offer. Multivariate econometric analyses based on regression and matching methods confirm this result. However, poolability tests reveal that the MAD has changed the manner in which corporate characteristics influence the capacity of insiders to make profit. We interpret our results considering the choice problem of the optimal amount of insider trading, when comparing the marginal costs and benefits of the illegal activity.

Cognitive biases lead entrepreneurs to overinvest in their own companies, over exposing themselves to idiosyncratic risk. Our novel theoretical model explains entrepreneurial under-diversification by measuring the amount of potential bias in entrepreneurs' portfolio allocations brought about by overconfidence and over optimism. Simulation analyses based on our model allow us calculating the implicit levels of overconfidence and over optimism from observable portfolio choices. Finally, using a unique dataset including cross-regional data on Italian entrepreneurs and a structural equation modeling approach, we test the effect of overconfidence and over optimism on entrepreneurs' portfolio allocations. Consistent with our theoretical predictions, we find a positive relationship between overconfidence and entrepreneur investments in their own companies. On the other hand, the role of over optimism seems to be negligible.

We assess how owner’s commitment to a firm influences the firm cost of capital, and whether the relation between the former and the latter is the consequence of the owner’s higher opportunity cost of capital resulting from under-diversification. Using data on private Mediterranean firms and clustering projects by country, industry, and Initial Public Offering-year, we show that the cost of capital is magnified by entrepreneur’s commitment, project total risk, and correlation between project and market return.

Sul mercato nazionale si è diffuso negli ultimi anni il fenomeno delle cosiddette “quotazioni meteora”, riferibile a quelle società che vengono “delistate” dopo pochi anni, nella maggior parte dei casi attraverso un’OPA promossa dall’azionista di maggioranza. Misurando il rendimento ottenuto da un investitore che abbia acquistato i titoli in fase di collocamento e li abbia mantenuti in portafoglio fino all’adesione all’OPA è possibile valutare, a posteriori, l’effettiva profittabilità dell’investimento in titoli oggetto di “quotazioni meteora” e, soprattutto, comprendere le motivazioni sottese alla quotazione. Le risultanze dell’indagine condotta sollevano seri dubbi su tali motivazioni, che potrebbero coincidere con finalità opportunistiche di breve termine, piuttosto che con piani di sviluppo di lungo periodo, rendendo opportuno un intervento del legislatore italiano volto a scongiurare eventuali comportamenti illeciti.

An avalanche of empirical studies has addressed the validity of the rank-size rule (or Zipf’s law) in a multi-city context in many countries. City size in most countries seems to obey Zipf’s law, but the question under which conditions (e.g. sample size, spatial scale) this ‘law’ holds remained largely underinvestigated. Another complementary question is whether socio-economic networks in space also show a similar hierarchical pattern. Against this background, the present paper investigates – from a methodological viewpoint – the relationship between network connectivity and the rank-size rule (or Zipf’s law) in an urban-economic network constellation. After a review of the literature, we address in particular the following methodological issues: (i) the (aggregate) behavioural foundation underlying the rank-size rule/Zipf’s law in the light of spatial-economic network theories (e.g. entropy maximization, spatial interaction theory, etc.); (ii) the nature of the analytical relationship between social-spatial network analysis and the rank-size rule/Zipf’s law. We argue that the rank size rule is compatible with conventional economic foundations of spatial network models. Consequently, a spatial-economic interpretation – as well as a network connectivity interpretation – of the rank-size rule coefficient is provided. Our methodological contribution forms the foundation for the subsequent empirical analysis applied to spatial networks in a socio-economic context. The aim here is to test the sensitivity of empirical findings for changes in scale, functional forms, time periods, and network structures. Our application is concerned with an extensive spatio-temporal panel database related to the evolution of urban population in Germany. We test the relevance of the rank-size rule/Zipf’s law, and its evolution over the years, and – in parallel – the related ‘socio-economic’ connectivity in these urban networks. In particular, we will show that Zipf’s law (i.e., with the rank-size coefficient equal to 1) is only valid under particular conditions of the sample size. The paper concludes with some retrospective and prospective remarks.

In questo lavoro esaminiamo la reazione del mercato a seguito della pubblicazione dei report emessi dagli analisti finanziari sulle società quotate in Italia contenenti un cambio di raccomandazione o di target price. I risultati mostrano come la reazione sia negativa in caso di downgrade e positiva in caso di upgrade, sia per i cambi di raccomandazione che di target price. La reazione è maggiore in valore assoluto per i downgrade piuttosto che per gli upgrade. Inoltre, quando i report riportano sia un cambio di raccomandazione sia un cambio di target price, la reazione è intensificata in caso di doppio upgrade o doppio downgrade. Nei casi in cui la direzione della revisione di raccomandazione è opposta a quella del target price, invece, i risultati suggeriscono che a prevalere sia l’informazione contenuta nel cambio di raccomandazione.