This paper aims at providing an explanation of the observed espresso price dispersion across major Italian cities. The empirical evidence suggests a positive relationships between the average espresso price in a city and the number of coffee shops (normalized for the adult population) operating...

Online review aggregators, such as TripAdvisor, HotelClub and OpenTable help consumers identify the products and services that best match their preferences. The goal of this study is to understand the impact of online review aggregators on firms and consumers. We adopt Salop's circular city...

This paper is about technology choices in a differentiated oligopoly. The main questions are: whether the position in the product space affects the choice of technology, how changes in fixed costs affect price outcomes, the strategic responses to policy interventions. The industry is an...

In this paper we analyze the private and public incentives towards skill acquisition when the skill level of workers determines the quality level of goods, and both labor and product markets are non competitive. We delve into the mechanisms that determine the equilibrium skill acquisition...

The paper proves the existence of a subgame perfect Nash equilibrium in a vertically differentiated duopoly with uncovered market, for a large set of symmetric and asymmetric distributions of consumers, including, among others, all logconcave distributions. The proof relies on the 'income share...

This paper studies the impact of size on labor cost and productivity for Italian manufacturing firms. The distributions of both labor cost and productivity display a wide support, even when disaggregated by sector of industrial activity. Further, both labor cost and productivity, when considered...

If the relation between investment and economic growth is well established in the macroeconomic literature, the existence of a similar link at the level of the firm has been challenged by empirical work. This paper investigates the channels linking investment and firm performance in the French...

This work investigates how the export status of the firm influences the patterns of growth at different age classes. We address this research question resorting to a novel set of data that links together the universe of Italian firms and detailed data on export transactions. We find that the...

Although the relevance of property rights and transaction costs for trade and innovation are well-known, we still lack a formal framework to think about their origins and interplay. Within trade interactions, fully protecting the original owners' property implies that some high-valuation...

We rationalize several facts emerging from the recent empirical research on cooperatives owned by workers (workers' firms, WF) as: the concern of WFs for employment; the interplay between membership and workplace safeguard within WFs; the different reaction to shocks between WFs and...