This paper analyzes the welfare losses deriving from centralized, uniform levels of public provision of good and services deriving from standards set up by a given level of government. The aim of the paper is to contribute to the growing literature on the e?ective outcomes of decentralization by...

Colombia is neither waging war against external enemies, nor has a dictatorial government engaged in a large scale repression of insurrection. However, it is possibly the most violent country of the world. Despite a number of papers focusing on the effects of violence on democracy in Colombia,...

This paper analyses the performance of an investment in sculptures during the period 1987-1995 by applying the hedonic price technique with time dummy variables to a sample of over 27,000 sales occured at auctions. The main finding is that the trend of the rate of return on an investment in...

Two basic approaches have been used by the literature focusing on the return to holding artistic works: the hedonic price model and the repeat-sales model. This paper provides a procedure for jointly estimating the two models in a way that take advantages of the unique information contained in...

The two-type model of non-linear income taxation with asymmetric information on individual ability levels is extended to discuss welfare effects of two policy instruments: a pure public good and a publicly provided private good. This latter is interpreted as health care. Three different cases...

A number of papers have empirically investigated the rational addiction model proposed by Becker and Murphy (1988) by using data on different harmful drugs; but also activities independent of a biological or pharmaceutical dependency have been analysed, such as cinema. The purpose of this paper...

There are many types of wines. Wine may be classified as traditional such as Barbaresco or Barolo (among the others), or international, such as the case of Merlot, Sauvignon, etc. Do objective and sensory characteristics impact di?erently on prices according to the wine variety? Using a sample...

A number of papers have empirically investigated the rational addiction model proposed by Becker and Murphy (1988) by using data on different harmful drugs, like cigarettes, alcohol, caffeine, opium, cocaine; but also activities independent of a biological or pharmaceutical dependency have been...

Using a sample based on 268 questionnaires submitted to people attending the Acquatico Bellucci circus, Italy, this paper analyzes the circusgoers's preferences for circus animals. Results show that higher preferences for circus animals are related to frequency of consumption. However,...

The repeat-sales model controls quality by utilizing the transacted prices of the same items in di.erent time periods. However, this methodology suffers from non-randomness of the data, implying that a sample based only on repeat-sales items may not represent the population of properties. To...