Background. Neurotrophins, such as BDNF and NGF, are overexpressed in tumor cells in cervical cancer, and HIV infection is associated with the upregulation of neurotrophin expression. Therefore, we aimed to investigate whether BDNF and NGF are overexpressed in preneoplastic cervical disease from HIV-infected women. Methods. Women with preneoplastic cervical lesions (cervical intraepithelial neoplasia grade 2 or 3) were prospectively enrolled and grouped according to their HIV status. Samples from Loop Electrosurgical Excision Procedure (LEEP) for suspected cervical cancer were obtained, and immunohistochemistry was performed to evaluate BDNF and NGF expression. Results. We included in our analysis 12 HIV-infected patients who were matched with 23 HIV-negative patients as a control group. Immunohistochemistry analysis showed that BDNF expression was significantly higher in cervical preneoplastic lesions from HIV-positive women than in the lesions from the control group. In particular, BDNF was expressed in 8/12 HIV-positive patients and 7/23 HIV-negative patients (66.7% vs. 30.4%, χ2 = 4.227; p = 0.040). NGF expression was not significantly higher in cervical preneoplastic lesions from HIV-positive women compared with that in the lesions from the control group. In particular, NGF was expressed in 8/12 HIV-positive patients and in 12/23 HIV-negative patients (66.7% vs. 52.2% χ2 = 0.676; p = 0.411). Logistic regression analysis showed that the HIV status is an independent predictor of BDNF expression in pre-invasive preneoplastic cervical disease when considered alone (crude OR 4.6, 95% CI 0.027–20.347; p = 0.046) and when analyzed with other co-factors (adjusted OR 6.786, 95% CI 1.084–42.476; p = 0.041). Conclusions. In preneoplastic cervical disease, BDNF expression is higher in HIV-infected women than in non-infected controls, and this is independent of the clinical features of the patients and from the presence of the HPV-HR genotype. BDNF can play a key role as a link between the pathways by which HIV and HPV interact to accelerate cervical cancer progression and invasion. These data can be useful to better understand the role of neurotrophins in the cancerogenesis of cervical cancer and the possible therapeutic strategies to improve disease outcomes.

In both the subprime crisis and the eurozone crisis, regulators imposed bans on short sales mainly aimed at preventing stock price turbulence from destabilizing financial institutions. Contrary to the regulators’ intentions, financial institutions whose stocks were banned experienced greater increases in the probability of default and volatility than unbanned ones. Increases were larger for more vulnerable financial institutions. To take into account the endogeneity of short sales bans, we match banned financial institutions with unbanned ones with similar sizes and levels of riskiness and instrument the 2011 ban decisions with regulators’ propensity to impose a ban in the 2008 crisis. (JEL G01, G12, G14, G18) Received July 8, 2020; editorial decision September 8, 2020 by Editor Isil Erel.

In Italian regions hit by earthquakes, homeowners typically receive public funds to finance reconstruction. While these funds are strictly tied to reconstruction work, they are in part disbursed up front, leading to significant variation in cash on hand. We exploit this variation to study the effects of liquidity on relatively wealthy households’ consumption. We find a large and significant response in the first year that homeowners receive the cash and provide evidence that this response is driven by illiquid households with bank debt. Instead, we find no evidence that consumption responds to funds paid directly to firms, thus leaving households’ liquidity unaffected. (JEL E21, G51, H76, Q54, R31)

View help for Summary A law issued to combat political corruption and Mafia infiltration of city councils in Italy has resulted in episodes of large, unanticipated, temporary contractions in local public spending. Using these episodes as instruments, we estimate the output multiplier of spending cuts at provincial level—controlling for national monetary and fiscal policy, and holding the tax burden of local residents constant—to be 1.5. Assuming that lagged spending is exogenous to current output brings the estimate of the overall multiplier up to 1.9. These results suggest that local spending adjustment may be quite consequential for local activity.

In Italian regions hit by earthquakes homeowners typically receive public funds to finance reconstruction. While these funds are strictly tied to reconstruction work, they are in part disbursed upfront, leading to significant variation in cash-on-hand. We exploit this variation to study the effects of liquidity on relatively wealthy households’ consumption. We find a large and significant response in the first year homeowners receive the cash, and provide evidence that this response is driven by illiquid households with bank debt. Instead, we find no evidence that consumption responds to funds paid directly to firms, thus leaving households’ liquidity unaffected.

Using novel monthly data for 226 euro-area banks from 2007 to 2015, we investigate the determinants of changes in banks’ sovereign exposures and their effects during and after the crisis. First, public, bailed out and poorly capitalized banks responded to sovereign stress by purchasing domestic public debt more than other banks, with public banks’ purchases growing especially in coincidence with the largest ECB liquidity injections. Second, bank exposures significantly amplified the transmission of risk from the sovereign and its impact on lending. This amplification of the impact on lending does not appear to arise from spurious correlation or reverse causality.

We measure output per worker in nearly 8,000 municipalities in the Italian electoral process using ballot counting times in the 2013 general election and two referenda in 2016. We document large productivity dispersion across provinces in this very uniform and low-skill task that involves nearly no technology and requires limited physical capital. Using a development accounting framework, this measure explains up to half of the firm-level productivity dispersion across Italian provinces and more than half the north-south productivity gap in Italy. We explore potential drivers of our measure of labor efficiency and find that its association with measures of work ethic and trust is particularly robust.

Exploiting three Italian earthquakes as quasi-experiments, we analyze the response of homeowners' consumption to targeted transfers, financing housing reconstruction over time. Like loans, these transfers mainly affect the liquidity of households' wealth in the short run: we show that they have no effect on consumption over a multi-year horizon. Yet, the access to reconstruction funds has significantly heterogeneous effects on impact: it strongly raises non-durable consumption by households with low liquidity and bank debt (the 'wealthy-hand-to-mouth'); it makes no difference for liquid households. Consistently, in either group, consumption is insensitive to transfer funds that accrue directly to firms.

Since 2008, euro-area sovereign yields have diverged sharply, and so have the corresponding CDS premia. At the same time, banks’ sovereign debt portfolios featured an increasing home bias. We investigate the relationship between these two facts, and its rationale. First, we inquire to what extent the dynamics of sovereign yield differentials relative to the swap rate and CDS premia reflect changes in perceived sovereign solvency risk or rather different responses to systemic risk due to the possible collapse of the euro. We do so by decomposing yield differentials and CDS spreads in a country-specific and a common risk component via a dynamic factor model. We then investigate how the home bias of banks’ sovereign portfolios responds to yield differentials and to their two components, by estimating a vector error-correction model on 2008-12 monthly data. We find that in most countries of the euro area, and especially in its periphery, banks’ sovereign exposures respond positively to increases in yields. When bank exposures are related to the country-risk and common-risk components of yields, it turns out that (i) in the periphery, banks increase their domestic exposure in response to increases in country risk, while in core countries they do not; (ii) in most euro area banks respond to an increase in the common risk factor by raising their domestic exposures. Finding (i) hints at distorted incentives in periphery banks’ response to changes in their own sovereign’s risk. Finding (ii) indicates that, when systemic risk increases, all banks tend to increase the home bias of their portfolios, making the euro-area sovereign market more segmented.

The random shock of natural disasters causes exogenous housing wealth losses and illiquidity, but also leads government to set up transfer programmes financing housing repair work. Exploiting three earthquakes in Italy as quasi-experiments, we show that the payment of cash transfers to homeowners in compensation for the housing repair costs raises households’ consumption of nondurables. We show that this eect is stronger and statistically significant for homeowners with a low level of liquid-wealth-to-income ratio, but absent when repair services are provided in kind — i.e., when the government money is transferred directly to firms. Our study contributes to the recent literature on the dynamic of the consumption demand by households that are “wealthy-hand-to-mouth” (see e.g. Kaplan et al., forthcoming), emphasizing micro-evidence in line with the main predictions of the theory. JEL classification: E21, E62

A law issued to combat political corruption and Mafia infiltration of city councils in Italy has resulted in episodes of large, unanticipated, temporary contractions in local public spending. Using these episodes as instruments, we estimate the output multiplier of spending cuts at provincial level—controlling for national monetary and fiscal policy, and holding the tax burden of local residents constant—to be 1.5. Assuming that lagged spending is exogenous to current output brings the estimate of the overall multiplier up to 1.9. These results suggest that local spending adjustment may be quite consequential for local activity. (JEL D72, E62, H71, K42)

According to conventional indicators, the euro-area financial integration has receded since 2007, mainly in the money market, sovereign debt market and uncollateralized credit markets. But price-based measures of debt market segmentation are inappropriate when solvency risk differs across countries: only the component of yield differentials that is not a reward for the issuer’s credit risk may reflect segmentation. We apply this idea to the euro sovereign debt market, using a dynamic factor model to decompose yield differentials in a country-specific and a common (or systemic) risk component. As the country-specific component dominates, purging yields from it produces much smaller measures of bond market segmentation than conventional ones for the crisis period. We also investigate how the home bias of banks’ sovereign portfolios – a quantity-based measure of segmentation – is related to yield differentials, by estimating a vector error-correction model on 2008-12 monthly data. We find that the sovereign exposures of banks in most euro-area countries respond positively to increases in yields, especially in periphery countries. When yield differentials are decomposed in their country-risk and common-risk components, we find that: (i) in the periphery, banks respond to increases in country risk by increasing their domestic exposure, while in core countries they do not; (ii) in contrast, in most euro-area countries banks respond to an increase in the common risk factor by raising their domestic exposures. Finding (i) hints at distorted incentives in periphery banks’ response to changes in their own sovereign’s risk. Finding (ii) indicates that, when systemic risk increases, all banks tend to increase the home bias of their portfolios, making the euro-area sovereign market more segmented.

The expected life-cycle cost can be regarded as a benchmark variable in decision making problems involving insurance policy making for existing structures in seismic risk prone areas. The present study is a preliminary study aiming to calculate the expected insurance premium for Italian building stock subjected to seismic action in its service lifetime based on probabilistic seismic loss assessment. The proposed methodology leads to probabilistic assessment of the structural performance, expressed in terms of the discrete structural limit state exceedance probabilities, and the life cycle cost taking into account the Italian seismic zonation and the seismic vulnerability of the existing life stock. The expected insurance premium can then be evaluated based on the probabilities that the structure exceeds a set of discrete limit state thresholds and the average costs associated to them. The methodology is implemented in an illustrative numerical example which considers the Italian residential building stock discretized in 5 structural typologies and in 8088 areas, corresponding to the Italian municipalities. A monopoly market-based insurance model is built, assuming risk aversion of the property owners and risk neutrality of the insurance companies. The expected insurance premium is evaluated for each structural typology in each Italian municipality, taking into account also the maximum coverage and the insurance excess systems. Results are aggregated to compute the total annual expected loss for the entire Italian building stock, and the total income and profit margin for the insurance company assuming an insurance contract for all the property owners. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

This book contains the proceedings of the conference Governance for the Eurozone: Integration or Disintegration? that was held at the European University Institute in Florence on 26 April 2012.

Using a dynamic factor model, we uncover four main empirical regularities on international comovements in a long-run panel of real and nominal variables. First, the contribution of world comovements to domestic output growth has decreased over the post-WWII period. The contribution of regional comovements, however, has increased significantly. Second, the share of inflation variation due to a global factor has become larger since 1985. Third, over most of the post-WWII period, international comovements within regions have accounted for the bulk of fluctuations in business cycle and inflation. Fourth, prices have become significantly less countercyclical during the post-1984 sample, with the largest contribution due to external developments.