We use a quantitative model to study the implications of European integration for welfare and migration flows across 1,318 regions. The model suggests that an increase of trade barriers to the level of 1957 reduces welfare by about 1-2 percent on average, depending on the presumed trade...

We estimate the Feldstein-Horioka equation for the period 1960-2012 and find structural breaks that coincide with the introduction of the European single market in 1993, the introduction of the euro in 1999 and the financial crisis in 2008. The results suggest that the correlation between...

Nineteenth-Century Catholic doctrine strongly opposed state schooling. We show that countries with larger shares of Catholics in 1900 (but without a Catholic state religion) tend to have larger shares of privately operated schools even today. We use this historical pattern as a natural...

We study ex post outsourcing of production in an imperfectly discriminating contest, interpreted here as a research tournament or a procurement contest for being awarded some production contract. We find that the possibility of outsourcing increases competition between the contestants, leading...

Trade data are typically reported at the level of regions or countries and are therefore aggregates across space. In this paper, we investigate the sensitivity of standard gravity estimation to spatial aggregation. We build a model in which initially symmetric micro regions are combined to form...

The objective of this paper is to examine the impact of crime on FDI inflows in 103 Italian provinces. The incidence of criminality is measured through the number of complaints for different kinds of crime. The analysis has been conducted using different estimation methods for panel data. The...

How do the media affect public support for democratic institutions in a fragile democracy? What role do they play in a dictatorial regime? We study these questions in the context of Germany of the 1920s and 1930s. During the democratic period, when the Weimar government introduced pro-government...

In the past two decades privatisation and liberalisation of network industries providing services of general economic interest (SGEI), have been particularly significant in the European Union. Wide variations around a common policy trend can, however, be observed across countries and sectors. We...

We study the contribution of market regulations in the dynamics of the real exchange rate within the European Union. Based on a model proposed by De Gregorio et al. (1994a), we show that both product market regulations in nontradable sectors and employment protection tend to inflate the real...