Exploring the main determinants of tourism participation at national and international level, the paper investigates if there are differences in tourism consumption behavior among Italian families which reflect disparities in their standard of living. To achieve this a Heckman model has been...

“Time to build” models of investment expenditures play an important role in many traditional and modern theories of the business cycle, especially for explaining the dynamic propagation of shocks. We estimate the structural parameters of a time-to-build model using firm-level investment data...

Recent developments in investment research have highlighted the importance of non-convexities and irreversibilities in the firms’ adjustment of quasi-fixed inputs. However, aggregation across capital goods may smooth out the discontinuities associated with the adjustment of individual assets....

This paper provides empirical evidence on delinking and Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) for municipal waste production in Italy. First, methodological issues and literature on delinking and EKC for waste are critically re-examined. Secondly, we analyse two very disaggregated panel datasets on...

This paper proposes a fixed-effect panel methodology that enables us to simultaneously take into account both TFP convergence and the traditional neoclassical-type of convergence. We analyse a sample of Italian regions between 1963 and 1993 and find strong evidence that both mechanisms were at...

This paper considers the estimation of binary choice panel data models with discrete endogenous regressors. We present a switching probit model which accounts for selectivity bias as well as for other forms of time invariant unobserved heterogeneity. Individual effects are allowed to be...

The number of studies seeking to empirically characterize the reduced-form relationship between a country's economic growth and the quantity of various pollutants produced has recently increased significantly. In several cases researchers have found evidence in favor of an inverted-U...

Since its first inception in the debate on the relationship between environment and growth in 1992, the Environmental Kuznets Curve has been subject to continuous and intense scrutiny. The literature can be roughly divided in two historical phases. Initially, after the seminal contributions,...

The general concern on the environmental implications of the rising demand for coal registered in China during the last few years has induced considerable research effort to produce accurate forecasts of China’s energy requirements. Nevertheless, no previous study has modelled the coal demand...

We estimate willingness to pay (WTP) for better quality of tap water on a unique cross-section sample from 10 OECD countries. On the pooled sample, households are willing to pay 7.5% of the median annual water bill to improve the tap water quality. The highest relative WTP for better tap water...