We use data on wages and rents in different U.S. cities to assess the amenity effects on production and consumption of cultural diversity as measured by diversity of countries of birth of city residents. We show that US-born citizens living in metropolitan areas where the share of foreign-born...

In recent years, interest in tourism has spread rapidly throughout many small and medium European cities, which previously have not necessarily considered themselves as tourist destinations. Tourism is increasingly seen as a potential lever towards high economic growth, measured both in terms of...

We investigate the existence of wage premium due to cultural diversity across US cities. Using census data from 1970 to 1990, we find that at the urban level richer diversity is systematically associated with higher average nominal wages for white US-born males. We measure cultural diversity in...

The question of the spatial impacts of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has animated intellectual and policy debate for a long time. At the beginning of the 1990s the advent of the Internet brought a new surge of debate: it was argued that the Internet would free the economy from...

We are interested in three related questions: (1) How should accounting prices be estimated? (2) How should we evaluate policy change in an imperfect economy? (3) How can we check whether intergenerational well-being will be sustained along a projected economic programme? We do not presume that...

In this paper we develop the standard utility function of a Ramsey-type optimal growth model to account for a ‘market-time’ vs. ‘free-time’ trade-off. To do so, we introduce a free-time preference coefficient that measures the utility gained by deviating from a maximum labour supply...

By studying the interaction between social capital and decentralization, we show that political decentralization can be a source of divergence across heterogeneous regions. In particular, we claim that since the local endowments of social capital display their effect on the economy mainly...

In this paper we analyze the relative importance and mutual behavior of two competing base-load electricity generation options that each are capable of contributing significantly to the abatement of global CO2 emissions: nuclear energy and coal-based power production complemented with CO2...

We study a quality-ladder model of endogenous growth that produces stochastic leadership cycles. Over a cycle, industry leaders can innovate several successive times in the same industry, gradually increasing the magnitude of their technological lead before being replaced by a new entrant....

This paper provides new empirical evidence on Environmental Kuznets Curves (EKC) for greenhouse gases (GHGs) and air pollutants at sector level. A panel dataset based on the Italian NAMEA over 1990-2005 is analysed, focusing on both emission efficiency (EKC model) and total emissions (IPAT...