Are stock price dynamics affected by financial analysts recommendations? Evidence from Italian green energy stocks

Quality & Quantity - In this paper we analyze whether financial analysts recommendations on trading strategies related to a given stock can influence its price dynamics. The recommendation for...     

Young SMEs as a Motor of Europe’s Innovation Machine

Intereconomics - Using large scale EIB Investment Survey evidence for 2016 covering 8,900 non-financial firms from all size and age classes across all sectors and all EU member states, the authors...     

Earnouts: The real value of disagreement in mergers and acquisitions

Earnout agreements link part of the payment for an acquired company to its future performance. Despite their option-like features, they cannot be valued using vanilla option-pricing methods. Two peculiar sources of risk affect these contracts: Bidder default before the earnout expiration (default risk) and potential litigation associated with earnouts (litigation risk). We developed an option-pricing model that encompasses these sources of risk, showing that counterparty and litigation risk can have a remarkable impact on earnout values. Our model's relevance is further enhanced by recent accounting standards that require contingent payments to be valued at fair value.     

Financing obstacles and growth: an analysis for euro area non-financial firms

This paper investigates the determinants of financing obstacles (FOs) and their impact on firm growth. For this purpose, we rely on both balance sheet data and survey data for a sample of non-financial firms in the euro area. The latter allows us to devise a direct measure of the firms’ probability of facing FOs. First, our results indicate that FOs are linked to characteristics such as the age of the firm, its size, its sales level or the sector in which it operates. Second, we find that, though based on few variables, our measure of FOs appears to be relevant in explaining firm growth in four out of the five countries considered; likewise, growth is found to be positively linked to cash flow.     

The spectrum policy reform paving the way to cognitive radio enabled spectrum sharing

The increasing amount of data and video traffic carried by mobile networks has recently risen the demand for enhanced network capacity, more efficient use and more effective management of spectrum. Cognitive radio technologies candidate to respond to these urgent needs by allowing a near simultaneous band sharing. The regulation plays a crucial role in promoting the adoption of these technologies, in order to overcome the traditional paradigms of authorizations for exclusive spectrum usage. The article outlines spectrum management regimes where the implementation of frequency sharing technologies, including cognitive technologies, is foreseeable and brings them back to a comprehensive taxonomy of dynamic spectrum access and sharing models, in the effort to reconcile partially diverging approaches and nomenclatures suggested in literature. Theoretic analysis is supported by a number of illustrations and practical experiments with shared spectrum usage. Based on suggested taxonomy, the research aims at showing the evolutionary path toward the introduction and spreading of cognitive and other spectrum sharing technologies, pointing out relevant trends and instruments made available by the reform of EU Telecom Package, as well as at outlining the status of regulation, policy and standardization in Europe.     

The role of private versus governmental venture capital in fostering job creation during the crisis

Small Business Economics - We analyze whether young entrepreneurial ventures backed by different types of venture capital firms, i.e., private (PVCs) vs. government-owned (GOVCs), experience higher...     

Estimating the Marginal Contribution to Systemic Risk by A CoVaR‐model Based on Copula Functions and Extreme Value Theory

In this paper, we quantify the contribution to systemic risk of a single financial institution by utilizing a analytical framework based on the principles of Extreme Value Theory (EVT) for modelling the marginal distributions and on the properties of copula functions for describing the dependence structure between the financial system and the single financial institution. Among the several systemic risk measures proposed nowadays by academics and estimated by public data, we choose to adopt as systemic risk metric the Conditional Value‐at‐Risk (CoVaR). We select a co‐risk measure like the CoVaR because of its macro‐dimension that allows us to integrate the dependence structure of the single financial institution and of the whole financial system in the systemic risk measurement. While the copula functions have been utilized in some pioneer studies on this area, the EVT principles have not yet been implemented in such a context of systemic risk contribution measurement.     

The Italian Banking Structure in the 1990s: Testing the Multimarket Contact Hypothesis

The multimarket contact hypothesis holds that more contacts between firms competing in the same markets may induce more collusion. This paper tests the hypothesis for the Italian banking market, analysing the behaviour of the largest Italian banks from 1990 to 1996. Market rivalry is gauged by changes in loan market shares and interest rates in each Italian province. We estimate the effects of increasing multimarket contacts, concentration indicators, banks' costs and loan demand on variations in market shares and interest rates. No support is found for the multimarket contact hypothesis. Geographical overlap in banking is positively correlated with changes in market shares, confirming the thesis of an overall increase in competition within the Italian banking system. Greater multimarket links also seem to correspond to lower lending rates.
(J.E.L.:G21, C33, L40.)