Taking as good the famous definition of economics attributed to Viner, “Economics is what economists do”, it is surprising to see how little the history of economics has addressed the matter of what economists actually do, above all outside the USA. The vast mass of data on research output...

In this short essay the contributions discussed at the Conference “From the crisis to the growth. Policies to sustain the SM firms”, taken place in June 2009 at the University of Padova, have been collected. In the contributions presented, moving from different points of view, the authors...

Economics, an introductory textbook

In this paper the authors present the findings of their research on a vast database containing the relevant information on the scientific characteristics of the three cohorts of assistant professors recruited in Italy in the early 1980s, the 1990s and the first few years of the new millennium....

Several recent papers argue that contracts provide reference points that affect ex post behavior. We test this hypothesis in a canonical buyer-seller relationship with renegotiation. Our paper provides causal experimental evidence that an initial contract has a highly significant and...

We present an international trade model with multiproduct firms. Firms are heterogeneously endowed with two types of capabilities that jointly determine the trade-off within firms between managing a large portfolio of products and producing at low marginal cost. The model can explain many of the...

This paper reports data from a laboratory experiment on two-period moral hazard problems. The findings corroborate the contract-theoretic insight that even though the periods are technologically unrelated, due to incentive considerations principals can benefit from offering long-term contracts...

We study a continuous-time game of strategic experimentation in which the players try to assess the failure rate of some new equipment or technology. Breakdowns occur at the jump times of a Poisson process whose unknown intensity is either high or low. In marked contrast to existing models, we...

We study endogenous group formation in tournaments employing experimental three-player contests. We find that players in endogenously formed alliances cope better with the moral hazard problem in groups than players who are forced into an alliance. Also, players who are committed to expending...