The aim of these lecture notes is to present a few mathematical facts about the bifurcations of nonlinear difference equations, in a concise and simple form that might be useable by economic theorists.

The measurement of the quality of research has reached nowadays an increasing interest not only for scientific reasons but also for the critical problem of researchers' ranking, due to the lack of grant assignments. The most commonly used approach is based on the so-called $h$-index, even if the...

This essay investigates the network structure of inter-firm worker mobility in Veneto, an industrial region of Northern Italy, using comprehensive employer-employee matched data. The empirical network reveals a small world pattern that hinges critically upon a few hub firms. Main hubs are found...

We study the problem of information sharing in oligopoly, when sharing decisions are taken before the realization of private signals. Using the general model developed by Raith (1996), we show that if firms are allowed to make bilateral exclusive sharing agreements, then some degree of...

We develop a model of friendship formation that sheds light on segregation patterns observed in social and economic networks. Individuals come in different types and have type-dependent benefits from friendships; we examine the properties of a steady-state equilibrium of a matching process of...

We study the incentives of oligopolistic firms to share private information on demand parameters. Differently from previous studies, we consider bilateral sharing agreements, by which firms commit at the ex-ante stage to truthfully share information. We show that if signals are i.i.d., then...

We study is the effect of moral hazard involved in non market contracts on the demand for marketed contracts. We extend Arnott and Stiglitz model on the coexistence of market and non-market insurance contracts to allow for the presence of Social Capital as a determinant of the severity of moral...

The paper presents a model of network formation where every connected couple give a contribution to the aggregate payoff, eventually discounted by their distance, and the resources are split between agents through the Myerson value. As equilibrium concept we adopt a refinement of pairwise...

We study the formation of social ties among heteogeneous agents in a model where meetings are governed by agents' directed search. The aim is to shed light on the important issue of homophily (the tendency of agents to connect with others of the same type). The essential contribution of the...

In this contribution we propose a dynamic tracking error problem and we consider the problem of monitoring at discrete point the shortfall of the portfolio below a set of given reference levels of wealth. We formulate and solve the resulting dynamic optimization problem using stochastic...