Business support policies are widespread in advanced countries, to foster employment and productivity. This paper analyses the role of organized crime in the allocation of public subsidies to businesses. We assemble an innovative data set on the Italian mafia at municipality level and test...

This paper investigates the urbanization of the Indian manufacturing sector by combining enterprise data from formal and informal sectors. We find that plants in the formal sector are moving away from urban and into rural locations, while the informal sector is moving from rural to urban...

We examine the role of organized labour in the restructuring experience of two coal-mining regions in the 1990s. Under similar external circumstances, the Czech Republic’s Ostrava region underwent gradual restructuring from early on whereas Romania’s Jiu Valley region went through no...

We focus on regional convergence based upon a sample of 19 European countries (1991-2008). After covering theoretical issues on -convergence and -convergence, we focused on the income distribution details. Our evidence confirms some results presented elsewhere, such as the convergence process...

Legal institutions are critical for the development of market-based economies. This paper defines legal institutions and discusses different indicators to measure their quality and efficiency. It surveys a large historical and empirical literature showing the importance of legal institutions in...