This paper surveys recent contributions on the Internalisation issue, based on different theories of the firm, to show how the make-or-buy decision, at an international level, has been assessed through the opening up of the “black box” - traditionally explored by the theorists of the firm...

China is appraised to have the world's largest exploitable reserves of shale gas, although several legal, regulatory, environmental and investment-related issues will likely restrain its scope. China's capacity to successfully face these hurdles and produce commercial shale gas will have a...

Data on the growth performances of countries with similar comparative (dis)advantage and political institutions reveal a striking variation across world regions. While some former autocracies such as the East Asian growth miracles have done remarkably well, others such as the Latin American...

This paper revisits the empirical evidence about the link between firms’ performance and their international status, based on a large sample of Italian enterprises. To this purpose, we merged two waves of the Capitalia survey (1998-2000, and 2001-2003) retrieving firm level data for roughly...

International climate protection investments (Joint Implementation and Clean Development Mechanism projects) are burdened with problems of contract enforcement, which prevent the realisation of efficiency gains associated with these investments. The paper analyses this problem from the...

As businesses span the globe, multinational and translational companies conduct their business operations in foreign settings, especially in developing countries and in countries in transition from Communist regimes. This poses new challenges to expatriate managers and to home-based staff in...

The survey is concerned with the issue of information transmission from experts to non-experts. Two main approaches to the use of experts can be traced. According to the game-theoretic approach expertise is a case of asymmetric information between the expert, who is the better informed agent,...

The paper is concerned with the interaction between two agents: an expert, announcing his probability that a particular state of the world will occur, and a non-expert decision-maker, who takes action according to his posterior beliefs. The decision-maker considers the expert an experiment of...

The paper focuses on the ongoing debate on non-market valuation, including the valuation environmental goods, and the opportunity to use contingent valuation for policy guidance. In fact, contingent valuation critics argue that reported willingness to pay answers do not reflect real economic...

The aim of this paper is to analyse patterns of private individual giving to Cultural Heritage institutions in Italy. Based on the emerging economic literature on pro-social behavior, we carried out a Contingent Valuation survey to assess individuals’ willingness to donate to museums and...