Suchergebnisse

Con la nascita e lo sviluppo della banconota comincia anche la storia delle banche centrali. Il periodo storico che va dalla metà del Seicento alla metà dell'Ottocento può essere considerato come un grande cantiere, nel quale sono state sperimentate le più svariate soluzioni per sostenere la fiducia nella banconota. Principalmente come ha riconosciuto Vera Smith il sistema dell'emissione di banconote tende ad essere organizzato in tre modi differenti: 1) attraverso l'accentramento in un organismo statale; 2) tramite l'attribuzione di un monopolio legale in materia a un ente privato assoggettato a controlli speciali; 3) con il decentramento a una molteplicità di enti privati in concorrenza. Risultato di questa sfida è un prolungato periodo di sperimentazioni durante il quale saranno testate tutte e tre le tipologie individuate da Vera Smith. All'interno di questo processo di sviluppo delle banche centrali si è affermato un modello intermedio. Tale modello, è il modello inglese, che prenderà forma nel 1844 attraverso l'adozione da parte del parlamento britannico del Bank Charter Act. L'analisi del sistema monetario inglese dell'epoca parte da una riflessione sul concetto di moneta come istituzione. Prendendo come punti di riferimento due studi che enfatizzano entrambi l'aspetto istituzionale della moneta. Mettendo a confronto il concetto di tecnologia di pagamento con il dilemma della liquidità è possibile così interpretare la storia delle banche centrali come un processo, innescato dalla banconota convertibile, attraverso il quale sono stati effettuati innumerevoli tentativi di rendere possibile un mercato del credito completamente liquido, ovvero privo di rischi. Al centro di questo processo c'è l'istituzione della Banca d'Inghilterra nel 1694, che permetterà in definitiva all'Inghilterra di fine Settecento di adottare un sistema monetario monometallico, basato sull'oro. Tale sistema di moneta convertibile in oro creerà non pochi problemi ai direttori della Banca d'Inghilterra, che saranno obbligati nel 1797 ad interrompere la convertibilità delle banconote in oro. L'importanza di questa dichiarazione d'inconvertibilità è stata sottolineata dagli innumerevoli dibattiti monetari che hanno caratterizzato tutta la prima metà dell'Ottocento, fino all'adozione del Bank Charter Act del 1844. All'interno del dibattito monetario inglese una figura di spicco come Sir Henry Thornton, aveva già individuato le linee guida dell'odierno central banking, sottolineando l'importanza del «credito di ultima istanza».

The empirical analysis of the effects of government policies on the incentives of economic agents is the leitmotif of the present thesis, with two distinct fields of application. While the first essay mostly contributes to the empirical banking literature, with a focus on the link between implicit guarantees for bank debt and political connections in Europe, the second one contributes to the field of education economics and is devoted to an analysis of the effects of bibliometric-based hiring and promotion schemes in Italian public universities on scholars' productivity. The two essays also share some methodological affinities. First, the two projects exploit two different identification strategies that have the common ambition of isolating and estimating a causal effect of public policies on the outcomes of interest. Second, the two works are characterized by the use of two original datasets, that have been obtained merging multiple sources of data, some of them pre-existing and others that have been hand-collected. Finally, the two essays share the novelty of the research questions they aim to answer, which are relatively unexplored by the existing literature.

Differently from Atkinson and Morelli (2011) who detect no clear link between increases in income inequality and systemic banking crises, we show that a large majority of crises occurred between 1982 and 2008 have been preceded by persistently high levels of income inequality. Such association is robust when considering Gini values for incomes after-tax as well as before-tax and transfers. Moreover, we investigate the pattern of income inequality levels before and after a group of banking crises and the relative levels of income inequality in a large sample of OECD countries that did not experience banking crises between 1980 and 2010.

Since the Neolithic seafaring allowed people to move over long distances. The coasts all across the Great Sea were touched by groups of seafarers that using long boats and coastal cabotage ventured by sea looking for new settlements or obsidian and other raw materials. During the III and first half of the II millennium BC sail navigation and innovations in naval technology rapidly developed in the eastern Mediterranean. This technical advance allowed to shorten distances, but lead seamanship to become a specialised task that required profound knowledge of the sea as an environment. Meteorology, oceanographic conditions and coastal morphology was necessary knowledge required to face the seascape. Most of this phenomenon was both fostered and exploited by the rising important local polities of the Bronze Age and the result was a high degree of connectivity within the eastern basin. More fragmentary appears to be the picture of contemporary maritime connections in the central and western basins, the main areas of interest of this study. Here eastern naval technological innovations will not arrive until the second half of the millennium. However in the same time span as in the east, local more modest, sea routes, begin to emerge. These implied the crossing of large portions of open sea. Despite the risk this type of navigation, favoured the colonisation of remote islands and the spread of local cultures during the copper age, and by the Early Bronze Age some common cultural patterns can be recognised in different regions but overall seafaring remains relevant on a local scale. By the second half of the II millennium BC these two realities began to be increasingly interconnected due to the opening of consistent long-range sea routes. From the XVII to the XII century BC, Aegean material culture and influences spread in the west all along these new sea routes. These were far from static and changed and evolved both in extension and in location of key nodes, leaving conspicuous amounts of traces behind. Starting from these traces, this work aims to investigate the sea routes that emerged during the Bronze Age for navigating in the central and western Mediterranean, how these evolved and expanded throughout the centuries, and what type of contacts and interconnections arose due to these maritime voyages, their nature and their intensity. Furthermore a diachronic study will be attempted by comparing the knowledge acquired on the sea routes of the Bronze Age with the routes and evidences of the Iron Age. The aim of this second part of the study would be to investigate the possible existence of trends and patterns in the choice and drawing of sea routes, surviving in later periods.