published and policy papers
My research interests include the effects of policy and macroeconomic shocks on international capital flows, as well as monetary policy and finance. I explore these themes from an empirical standpoint.
Besides the published papers listed below, I wrote internal notes on capital flows and financial market developments, the transmission of energy shocks in CEE economies, the use of profits by energy firms in the last few years, and the effect of electoral uncertainty on financial markets.
The gravity of Offshore Financial Centers: Estimating real FDIs using a binary choice model
with Alessio Anzuini, Fabrizio Ferriani and Luca Rossi
International Economics, 2024
Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Bank of Italy Occasional Papers) N. 805, 2023
Fiscal and regulatory arbitrage opportunities in Offshore Financial Centers (OFCs) materially distort the economic analysis based on cross-border capital flows. However, despite its significance, there is limited information on the true scale of this phenomenon. This paper focuses on Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs) and fills this gap by using an extensive list of FDIs determinants and estimating a gravity-like binary choice specification to assess how much bilateral FDIs are driven by economic integration motives versus profit shifting opportunities. We find that the share of so-called phantom FDIs, after rising in 2010–15, stabilized at around 40% of total FDIs in recent years and that this share is systematically larger in OFCs, reconciling available evidence on the abnormal amount of recorded FDIs in these countries.
The impact of restrictions on FDI
with Flavia Corneli, Valerio Nispi Landi and Alessandro Schiavone
Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Bank of Italy Occasional Papers) N. 656, 2021
In the 1990s and 2000s most countries, including many emerging economies, lifted some barriers to FDI along with trade liberalization; since the global financial crisis this trend has slowed. In this paper, we assess the impact of FDI restrictions on gross in flows by exploiting the sectoral dimension of FDI flows and of the regulatory restrictiveness index (RRI) reported in the OECD databases. In a sample of 17 OECD countries and 23 sectors over the time span 2012-2018, we find that FDI restrictions significantly dampen foreign investments in the manufacturing and services sectors, particularly when they limit foreign equity acquisitions. We also consider restrictions motivated by national security considerations, which are not scored in the RRI; like other controls involving screening schemes, they have not had any significant impact on the size of FDI flows.