Households must also be convinced of the importance of investing in knowledge: Italy ranks second last in the European Union on the proportion of young people aged between 25 and 34 with tertiary education; it is ranked first for the share of young people aged between 15 and 29 who neither study nor work.
Our distinguished invited speakers, Lenos Trigeorgis, Jean-Bernard Chatelain, Charles Himmelberg and Julian Franks, will give an overview of these subjects in their contributions. The first strand shows that in the presence of information asymmetries firms with weak balance sheets may become financially constrained in the sense that their cost of external funds substantially increases or that they are unable to attract external funds.