As tourism is becoming one of the most important sources of economic growth at the local level, it is imperative to identify and assess the relevant determinants of tourism flows. This paper investigates this issue by carrying out an econometric analysis based on the origin-destination (OD)...

In this paper we test for the hold-up problem by considering the effect of unions’ bargaining power on the rate of growth of investment per worker and labour productivity across sectors characterised by different levels of sunk capital investments. We develop a search and matching model with...

We study the connection between economic performance and the quality of government institutions for the sample of 103 Italian NUTS3 regions, including new measures of institutional quality calculated using data on the provision of four areas of public service - health, educational...

Empirical research on the impact and determinants of group lending is by now substantial. However, very little is known about the possible role of collateral to mitigate incentive problems in group lending. This is because microcredit programs have normally been implemented in rural areas of...

We analyze the effect of a bankruptcy law according to which some of the borrower’s assets are exempt from liquidation in the event of default in the context of a competitive credit market characterized either by moral hazard (MH) or by adverse selection (AS). In particular, we study how the...

During the Subprime crisis the entire banking industry risked collapsing under an unprecedented lack of liquidity. This work tries and find what channel allowed a relatively small systemic shock, the increased mortgage delinquency in the US housing market, to spread worldwide with such a...

The paper analyzes the impact of domestic and international tourism on the economic growth process for 179 European regions. The econometric analysis is based on a spatial growth regression framework where the rate of GDP per capita growth at the regional level for the period 1999-2009 is...

The paper investigates the impact of distance, contiguity and technological proximity on cross- regional knowledge flows, by comparing the evidence concerning co-inventorship, applicant-inventor relationships and citation flows. We find evidence of significant differences across these diverse...