Università della Svizzera italiana

Poolability and aggregation problems of regional innovation data : an application to nanomaterial patenting

Patuelli, Roberto ; Vaona, Andrea ; Grimpe, Christoph

Research and development (R&D) in the field of nanomaterials is expected to be a major driver of innovation and economic growth. In this respect, many countries, as national systems of innovation, have established support programs offering subsidies for industry- and government-funded R&D. Consequently, it is of great interest to understand which factors facilitate the creation of new...

Università della Svizzera italiana

Regional inflation persistence : evidence from Italy

Vaona, Andrea ; Ascari, Guido

Regional patterns of inflation persistence have received attention only at a very coarse level of territorial disaggregation, that of EMU member states. However economic disparities within EMU member states are an equally important policy issue. This paper considers a country with a large regional divide, i.e., Italy, at a fine level of territorial disaggregation (NUTS3). Our results show that...

Università della Svizzera italiana

New empirical evidence on local financial development and growth

Vaona, Andrea ; Patuelli, Roberto

In this paper, we show that the regional finance-growth nexus in Italy is robust to a series of innovations with respect to the existing literature on the topic. We use finer measures of economic and financial development, as well as instruments with a deeper economic content. We rely on state-of-the-art cross-sectional and panel estimation methods, and we offer a thorough investigation of the...

Università della Svizzera italiana

STATA tip : a quick trick to perform a Roy-Zellner test for poolability in STATA

Vaona, Andrea

We show how to easily implement a Roy-Zellner test for poolability in STATA and we offer an application to the Grunfeld dataset.

Università della Svizzera italiana

The sensitivity of nonparametric misspecification tests to disturbance autocorrelation

Vaona, Andrea

We show that some nonparametric specification tests can be robust to disturbance autocorrelation. This robustness can be affected by the specification of the true model and by the sample size. Once applied to the prediction of changes in the Euro Repo rate by means of an index based on ECB wording, we find that the least sensitive nonparametric tests can have a comparable performance to a RESET...

Università della Svizzera italiana

Inflation persistence, structural breaks and omitted variables : a critical view

Vaona, Andrea

Recent empirical contributions assess time changes in inflation persistence by means of simple autoregressive models. Their reliability is discussed in the light of the econometric literature on model misspecification and it is showed that their results can be misleading due to the omission of relevant variables.