It is widely recognized that regional policies implemented in Southern Italy in the last 15 years have had poor effects in terms of Gdp, employment and firms' performance. This chapter seeks to put forth possible explanations of this unfortunate outcome and to predict the likely impact of the...

E' ben noto che i tassi di interesse sul credito bancario differiscono significativamente secondo che le imprese appartengono a diversi settori industriali, aree geografiche, gruppi di eta'. La spiegazione usuale di questo fenomeno Š che esista una correlazione tra l'appartenenza al gruppo e la...

We present a solution for a three stage spatial competition model that does not require restrictive assumptions on price expectations. This allows us to generalize the Raith (2003) model to the case where principals behave in a fully strategic fashion both in the price and in the compensation...

Increasing premiums, increasing claims and decreasing profits are three striking facts associated in some European countries to motor insurance liberalization of 1990's. In this paper, we argue that these phenomena may be considered not a consequence of collusion or other misapplications of...

In this paper we introduce a new concept of structural convergence and propose an index of dissimilarity among time series as a measure of global convergence of macroeconomic phenomena. The index is built up from the autoregressive distance estimator. The index has the suitable characteristic of...

La teoria economica delle professioni si Š essenzialmente concentrata sulla individuazione della razionalita' economica esistente dietro i diversi meccanismi di regolamentazione dei mercati professionali e sui suoi possibili effetti sul benessere della collettivita'. Sono stati invece...

An argument commonly adduced to explain differences in economic development among regions is the scarcity of entrepreneurial talent in less developed regions. This paper disputes this idea, pointing out that in less developed regions the scant diffusion of innovative entrepreneurial activities...

A growing body of research focuses on banking organizational issues, emphasizing the culties encountered by hierarchically organized banks in lending to borrowers/projects with high intensity of soft information. However, as the two extreme cases of hierarchical and non-hierarchical...