#Diogenedixit

2020-07-28 Donato Masciandaro

Finance, Oversight, and Fraud: the case of Wirecard

In the month of June, the Wirecard scandal erupted in Germany. Let's recall the main events. Until that time, Wirecard was mostly known as a success story among companies that use technology to produce banking and financial services. These are firms that some love to call "financial unicorns:" the noun evokes the special nature - whether true or presumed - of the technology used, and the adjective the activity in the sector of banking and finance. But all of the sudden, a statement released by the Central Bank of the Philippines confirmed some important news: Wirecard has a budget hole of almost ...

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2020-07-15 Gianmarco Ottaviano

Recovery Fund: How to Distribute the Resources among Member States?

The Member States of the European Union are currently engaged in difficult negotiations on the Recovery Fund, the fund of 750 billion euros whose purpose is to help European regions recover from the Covid-19 shock. The public debate is dominated by the question of "conditionalities," that is, to what extent the provision of the funds must be conditional upon specific economic policy choices by the beneficiary countries. Although important, this question risks overshadowing another decisive issue, that of the criteria for allocation of the resources among the Member States. Should the EU favor ...

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2020-07-09 Cecilia Attanasio Ghezzi

The Solitude of the WHO

"They’re giving [the information] to us 15 minutes before it appears on CCTV," the Chinese state channel. This, according to Gauden Galea, the World Health Organization (WHO) representative in Beijing. His words clearly describe the UN agency's frustration toward China at the beginning of January, with the attempt to scrape up the little information available on the new coronavirus, the one that has now infected almost 12 million people around the world, provoking over 550,000 deaths. This statement is part of an account by the United States news agency Associated Press[1] that confirms the ...

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2020-07-09 Cecilia Attanasio Ghezzi

The Solitude of the WHO

"They’re giving [the information] to us 15 minutes before it appears on CCTV," the Chinese state channel. This, according to Gauden Galea, the World Health Organization (WHO) representative in Beijing. His words clearly describe the UN agency's frustration toward China at the beginning of January, with the attempt to scrape up the little information available on the new coronavirus, the one that has now infected almost 12 million people around the world, provoking over 550,000 deaths. This statement is part of an account by the United States news agency Associated Press[1] that confirms the ...

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2020-07-07 Gianluca Meloni, Marco Morelli

Forecasting in Times of Uncertainty: It Can Be Done

The Covid-19 emergency has caused a strong change in the business models of companies in many sectors. For some of them it has simply been an accelerator, for others something absolutely new. It is inevitable that, faced with this path of evolution, control systems, that have the goal of supporting decision-making processes and orienting management behavior, cannot be left out of this change. In particular, in a context characterized by a high level of discontinuity with respect to the past and by high levels of uncertainty, above all traditional tools for forecasting results and setting goals ...

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2020-07-07 Gianluca Meloni, Marco Morelli

Forecasting in Times of Uncertainty: It Can Be Done

The Covid-19 emergency has caused a strong change in the business models of companies in many sectors. For some of them it has simply been an accelerator, for others something absolutely new. It is inevitable that, faced with this path of evolution, control systems, that have the goal of supporting decision-making processes and orienting management behavior, cannot be left out of this change. In particular, in a context characterized by a high level of discontinuity with respect to the past and by high levels of uncertainty, above all traditional tools for forecasting results and setting goals ...

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2020-06-24 Gimede Gigante, Rodolfo Pambianco

Italian Banks Face the Text of COVID-19

What impact will COVID-19 have on Italian banks? This is the most frequent question in financial circles in these weeks. Today, there is no answer yet. It will take some time. A question we can ask, though, is: what is the condition of Italian banks today compared to the time of the previous crisis, that of 2008? We can answer this question. And actually, this is a first and necessary step to take in order to answer the initial question. We will divide our response into two parts. In the first part, we will analyze what Italian banks have done in terms of: improvement of asset quality, measures ...

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2020-06-19 Gimede Gigante, Rodolfo Pambianco

Italian Banks Face the Text of COVID-19

What impact will COVID-19 have on Italian banks? This is the most frequent question in financial circles in these weeks. Today, there is no answer yet. It will take some time. A question we can ask, though, is: what is the condition of Italian banks today compared to the time of the previous crisis, that of 2008? We can answer this question. And actually, this is a first and necessary step to take in order to answer the initial question. We will divide our response into two parts. In the first part, we will analyze what Italian banks have done in terms of: improvement of asset quality, measures ...

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2020-06-11 Donato Masciandaro

Bank and Country, the Two Faces of Financial Nationalism

In the months that have just passed, in advanced countries the banks have been the chain of transmission of urgent policy interventions, designed by governments to sustain the aggregate demand for goods and services. Time will tell us what strategy is most effective. Let’s look ahead, though. To do so, like Giano, we will concentrate on what happened in Italy before the pandemic recession began. In at least two cases - that of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) and that of the Banca Popolare di Bari - the Italian political class has been faced with a question that will certainly arise again ...

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2020-06-05 Andrea Beltratti, Alessia Bezzecchi

The Importance of Big Data for Real Estate

In addition to the loss of numerous human lives, the COVID-19 pandemic is causing significant economic harm to our country. An additional aspect, which is just as important, though less discussed, regards the role of data. It is sometimes said that data is the "new oil," to reference the potential wealth linked to the creation and use of sources of reliable data. This is not really a new discovery: still today history books speak of how the great civilizations of the past, from the Egyptians to the Assyrians, distinguished themselves precisely for the systematic collection of empirical evidence ...

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