Research projects under way

The main objective of this project is to investigate contract enforcement in consumer credit markets. In particular, debt collection by third parties has become a norm in countries with developed consumer credit markets (the U.K., the U.S., Spain, China). It is unclear, however, why creditors need to outsource debt collection in the first place and what determines the industrial organization of the debt collection industry. This paper, to the best of my knowledge, will be the first to address this issue.

This paper empirically investigates the relation between analyst coverage and substantial stock price
declines (crashes).

Recent research which analyzes detailed pension fund return data (mainly US and Canada) finds that it is precisely in alternative asset classes, and particularly so in private equity, that there are marked differences in performance across investors (Dyck and Pomorski, 2011, and Cremers et al., 2011). They find that size is the primary driver of performance. Larger pension
funds obtain higher returns. This finding raises three important questions: What is different about large investors when it comes to private equity investing? Are these results generalizable beyond pension funds? What makes larger pension funds earn higher returns? This paper attempts to answer these questions by means of a worldwide survey of
private equity investors, also called Limited Partners (LPs).

The paper aims at illustrating the strategies played by major world exchanges in the last years as well as trying to depict what we can expect in the near future.

The goal of this paper is to analyze how investors’ behavior is affected by macroeconomic conditions, and specifically how the choice of mutual fund varies between “good times” and “tough times”.

This paper aims at establishing if asset sales in a sample of European sellers create or destroy value for their shareholders by estimating the abnormal return at announcement date and by investigating what variables explain it.

I propose to study if positional goods in the form of orders of merit can substitute for monetary compensation in providing incentives for CEOs.

Our reasearch project, by providing a theoretical discussion on the regulation of the tick size when different platforms compete for the provision of liquidity, is ideally suited to address the issue of sub-penny trading. Starting with a one-market model, we will show that the effect of a tick size reduction depends both on the liquidity of the stock and on the value of the asset. We expect that for liquid stocks a reduction of the tick size makes undercutting cheaper, and thus it increases competition among liquidity suppliers and improves market quality.

We identify the occurrence of contagion through international wholesale liquidity markets and through foreign bank ownership that occurred during the recent financial crisis.

This project aims at providing fresh evidence on the relative importance of asset allocation vs. manager selection using a unique dataset tracking the performance of the closed Italian pension funds (111 sub-funds belonging to 32 funds) over the 1999-2009 period.