Using data on the 20 Italian regions for the period 1970-1995, I examine whether the presence of social capital, as reflected in a number of different measures collected by Putnam (1993), affects economic productivity. I find three types of effects. First, social capital, when treated as an...

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...

In this paper we specify and estimate different Markov-switching (MS) regime autoregressive models. The empirical performance of the univariate MS models used to describe the switches between different economic regimes for the G-7 countries is in general not satisfactory. We extend these models...

We explore the relationship between litigation rates and the number of lawyers, in a typical supplier-induced demand (SID) frame. Drawing on an original panel dataset for the 169 Italian courts of justice between 2000 and 2007, we first document that the number of lawyers is positively...

In many developed countries, abandoned (derelict or underused) industrial areas often occupy important parts of the cities. This raises issues about the possibilities of reusing these areas as well as on the conservation of industrial heritage they often entail. Conjoint Analysis (CA) can shed...

Geography has long been considered as a fundamental prerequisite for economic development and growth. In recent years, a growing number of papers have considered the role of physical geography as a determinant of regional growth and development by considering it as a source of “intrinsic...

This paper presents a detailed documentation of the hybrid energy-economy model REMIND-D. REMIND-D is a Ramsey-type growth model for Germany that integrates a detailed bottom-up energy system module, coupled by a hard link. The model provides a quantitative framework for analyzing long-term...

This article studies the likely impact of unconventional gas developments in the U.S. on EU competitiveness. We find, first of all, little evidence for a prosperous unconventional gas development in Europe. Second, the U.S. boom has already a strong impact on both world and European energy...

We introduce the notion of language disenfranchisement which arises if the number of EU working languages is reduced. We use the data on language proficiency in EU and show that, in spite of the widespread knowledge of English, the retention of French and German as working languages in essential...

We examine patterns of acquiring non-native languages in a model with two languages and two populations with heterogeneous learning skills, where every individual faces a binary choice of learning the foreign language or refraining from doing so. We show that both interior and corner linguistic...