Bank Concentration and Structure of Manufacturing Sectors: Differences Between High and Low Income Countries

This paper investigates the relationship between bank concentration and the real economy by analyzing the number and average size of firms in manufacturing industries in two samples of countries with differing levels of economic development. We use a panel of 42 countries and 27 manufacturing industries for the period 1993-2001, and we apply the Rajan-Zingales (1998) methodology. The main finding is that in developed countries higher levels of bank concentration are associated with lower number of firms, of bigger size, while in developing countries this relationship does not seem to be significant.Bank concentration; Industry structure; Country income groups;

Macroeconomic Models Used for the Impact Evaluation of the Structural Funds in Objective 1 Economies

The paper reviews the literature on the evaluation of the macroeconomic of the EU Structural Funds and it focuses on the macroeconomic models used by the European Commission for the assessment of the Objective 1 Community and Structural Frameworks. It emerges that more detailed Structural Funds expenditure data as well as macroeconometric models taking into account spatial interaction effects and industry dimension are needed to better evaluate the impact of EU Funds at regional level.EU Structural Funds impact evaluation; Macroeconomic models;

A Concrete Composite 2-Higgs Doublet Model

We consider a Composite Higgs Model (CHM) with two isospin doublet Higgs fields arising as pseudo Nambu-Goldstone bosons from a ${\rm SO}(6)\to {\rm SO}(4)\times {\rm SO}(2)$ breaking. The main focus of this work is to explicitly compute the properties of these Higgses in terms of the fundamental parameters of the composite sector such as masses, Yukawa and gauge couplings of the new spin-1 and spin-1/2 resonances. Concretely, we calculate the Higgs potential at one-loop level through the Coleman-Weinberg mechanism from the explicit breaking of the ${\rm SO(6)}$ global symmetry by the partial compositeness of fermions and gauge bosons. We derive then the phenomenological properties of the Higgs states and highlight the main signatures of this Composite 2-Higgs Doublet Model at the Large Hadron Collider, including modifications to the SM-like Higgs couplings as well as production and decay channels of heavier Higgs bosons. We also consider flavour bounds that are typical of CHMs with more than one Higgs doublet.Comment: 45 pages, 16 figures, version accepted for publication in JHE

Extra Higgs Boson and Z′Z' as Portals to Signatures of Heavy Neutrinos at the LHC

In this paper, we discuss the potential of observing heavy neutrino ($\nu_h$) signatures of a $U(1)_{B-L}$ enlarged Standard Model (SM) encompassing three heavy Majorana neutrinos alongside the known light neutrino states at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We exploit the theoretical decay via a pair of heavy (non-SM-like) Higgs boson and $Z'$ production followed by $\nu_h \rightarrow l^\pm W^{\mp (*)}$ and $\nu_h \rightarrow \nu_l Z^{(*)}$ decays, ultimately yielding a $3l+2j+E_{T}^{\rm{miss}}$ signature and, depending upon how boosted the final state objects are, we define different possible selections aimed at improving the signal to background ratio in LHC Run 2 data for a wide range of heavy neutrino masses.Comment: 31 pages, 10 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1612.0597

Job Insecurity and Financial Distress

This paper investigates the effects of different job categories on households’ likelihood of experiencing financial distress. Given imperfect financial markets and the absence of unemployment subsidies, households with less secure jobs are likely to experience drops in income more frequently than households with well-protected jobs. Households’ abilities to deal with financial decisions (i.e. financial literacy) can mitigate these problems. Our results suggest that greater job insecurity increases the probability of being in financial distress similarly than other working statuses (e.g. unemployment), and in some cases even more (i.e. part-time workers). However, a high level of financial literacy can counterbalance this effect, especially for atypical workers

Phenomenology of minimal Z' models: from the LHC to the GUT scale

We consider a class of minimal abelian extensions of the Standard Model with an extra neutral gauge boson $Z'$ at the TeV scale. In these scenarios an extended scalar sector and heavy right-handed neutrinos are naturally envisaged. We present some of their striking signatures at the Large Hadron Collider, the most interesting arising from a $Z'$ decaying to heavy neutrino pairs as well as a heavy scalar decaying to two Standard Model Higgses. Using renormalisation group methods, we characterise the high energy behaviours of these extensions and exploit the constraints imposed by the embedding into a wider GUT scenario.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures. Reference list updated. Contribution to the proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on QCD - Theory and Experiment (QCD@Work 2016), 27-30 Jun 2016. Martina Franca, Ital

Z′Z', Higgses and heavy neutrinos in U(1)′U(1)' models: from the LHC to the GUT scale

We study a class of non-exotic minimal $U(1) '$ extensions of the Standard Model, which includes all scenarios that are anomaly-free with the ordinary fermion content augmented by one Right-Handed neutrino per generation, wherein the new Abelian gauge group is spontaneously broken by the non-zero Vacuum Expectation Value of an additional Higgs singlet field, in turn providing mass to a $Z'$ state. By adopting the $B-L$ example, whose results can be recast into those pertaining to the whole aforementioned class, and allowing for both scalar and gauge mixing, we first extract the surviving parameter space in presence of up-to-date theoretical and experimental constraints. Over the corresponding parameter configurations, we then delineate the high energy behaviour of such constructs in terms of their stability and perturbativity. Finally, we highlight key production and decay channels of the new states entering the spectra of this class of models, i.e., heavy neutrinos, a second Higgs state and the $Z'$, which are amenable to experimental investigation at the Large Hadron Collider. We therefore set the stage to establish a direct link between measurements obtainable at the Electro-Weak scale and the dynamics of the underlying model up to those where a Grand Unification Theory embedding a $U(1)'$ can be realised.Comment: 32 pages, 59 figures, journal versio

8{}^8Be Decay Anomaly and Light Z′Z'

In this proceedings, we discuss a light (17 MeV) $Z'$ solution to the anomaly observed in the decay of Beryllium-8 by the Atomki collaboration. We detail an anomaly free model with minimal particle content which can satisfy all other experimental constraints with gauge couplings $\mathcal{O}(10^{-4})$.Comment: Prepared for the 2019 EW session of the 54th Rencontres de Moriond, talk presented by Simon Kin

Bank Concentration and Structure of Manufacturing Sectors: Differences Between High and Low Income Countries

This paper investigates the relationship between bank concentration and the real economy by analyzing the number and average size of firms in manufacturing industries in two samples of countries with differing levels of economic development. We use a panel of 42 countries and 27 manufacturing industries for the period 1993-2001, and we apply the Rajan-Zingales (1998) methodology. The main finding is that in developed countries higher levels of bank concentration are associated with lower number of firms, of bigger size, while in developing countries this relationship does not seem to be significant