Massimiliano Serati

Because local economic development is linked to the ability to attract business, policymakers have begun to endow territories with suitable factor conditions for the enticement of new enterprises, as in the case of EU Structural Funds. We investigate this phenomenon to provide valuable policy suggestions with a dynamic factor model and a panel regression analysis with spatial effects on a database with many cross-sections (1531 municipalities) and variables (55 indicators). Results show that structural variables like technological endowment, infrastructural provision, productive structure, local taxation, human capital and innovation represent the most important drivers to stimulate business location, even at the municipal level, offering relevant cues for policymakers.

Since the 2008 Financial crisis, macroeconomic and financial markets' stabilisation policies relied mainly on monetary actions, reducing the ECB's margin of manoeuvre and calling for a major role for fiscal authorities. We investigate the impact of government decisions on financial markets for 11 Eurozone economies (from 1995 to 2021), in the very short run, using an event study, finding a positive (negative) reaction to fiscal expansion (consolidation) announcements and in the short/ medium-run, with a Bayesian TVP-FAVAR, identifying cross-country heterogeneities; stronger (weaker) public finances show a direct (indirect) relation between fiscal policies and stock prices and an indirect (direct) one with 10-year bond yield.

Lease accounting has often been criticized for being too reliant on bright lines and subjective judgments, as lessees were not required to disclose assets and liabilities arising from operating leases directly on the balance sheet, thereby improving the appearance of the financial condition to investors. To remedy this, in January and February 2016 the IASB and the FASB issued the new accounting standard IFRS 16 and ASC 842, starting a new era of lease accounting and ending the guesswork previously required when calculating companies' lease obligations. This paper investigates the impact on investors' risk perception level of EU and US airline companies, following the enactment of these accounting standards. Results confirm the importance of disclosing all the relevant information about leases directly within the financial statements and not in footnotes, as this increases transparency and comparability between financial statements, protecting all investors, ranging from the rational ones to the more credulous.

Tourism has the potential to protect natural and cultural assets upon which it depends; however, the growing number of travelers may pose burdens. Among the potential environmental externalities, solid waste production is an often overlooked factor, although the literature highlights it as one of tourism's most visible impacts on the environment. This paper aims to address the complex interdependence of tour- ism and waste generation using spatial models. The results showed a positive response of solid waste disposal at an increase in tourism flows. Due to the complex- ity of the topic, the research note calls for future research.

This paper aims at studying the mechanisms through which credit markets convey financial shocks to the real economy. To accomplish this task, we perform a comprehensive assessment of the credit market dynamics in the Euro Area, from their drivers and evolution over time to the cross-country heterogeneity of their effects. We do so by employing a Bayesian TVP-FAVAR model which adopts a novel identification strategy exploiting data on 11 Euro Area economies (Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain) between 2000:Q1 and 2018:Q4. We find that firms' financing displays higher sensitivity than households’ borrowing to credit demand and supply contractions and that, overall, credit aggregates reactions to such shocks display both time and cross-country heterogeneities. Policy-wise, this evidence highlights the need for structural interventions to better align the functioning of the banking and industrial systems in the Euro Area countries.

Policy makers cannot ignore a careful assessment of the territories involved in their actions, requiring quantitative information that should be robust and capillary, able to synthesize complex/cross-thematic phenomena, and organized in large statistical sets. However, many of these data sets are stuck on a macrolevel of detail (e.g. national/regional), unsuitable for micro-territorial analyses, and instead of being geared toward the support of territorial planning are mostly descriptive. The authors developed 100% Lombardia, a statistical platform able to fill this gap, providing more than 160 indicators for the Lombardy region with a timespan running from 2001 to 2015. 100% Lombardia has been designed to support territorial planning and it has been successfully used in various regional policies, discussed in the paper, thus constituting a valuable micro-territorial policy making tool. Keywords: micro-territorial indicators; local policy making; 100% Lombardia.