EU New Member States must comply with the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) and the investment requirements implied by the Lisbon Agenda. However, the SGP rules may result in underinvestment or distortions in the allocation of public expenditure. This paper provides new evidence on the effects of...

We study the potential for introducing indexation on loans provided by multilateral lenders to low income countries (LICs), and thus whether a reform of their lending policy is feasible and economically justified. To this end, we provide new evidence for a group of 40 international development...

This paper presents a simple model in which debt management stabilizes the debt-to-GDP ratio in face of shocks to real returns and output growth and thus supports fiscal restraint in ensuring sustainability. The optimal composition of public debt is derived by looking at the relative impact of...

This article analyses the effect of trade openness, implemented in Chile after 1974, on wage inequality. In the first part, this study analyses inequality and wage distribution in Chile. Workers are grouped in three categories, according to the educational level reached, in order to discriminate...

This paper studies the role of industrial clusters in stimulating regional innovation and economic cohesion in Europe. Starting from an overview of industrial clusters in the EU, in which we highlight the strengths and weaknesses of agglomerations of firms, we empirically investigate how cluster...

We study the effects of service offshoring on the wages of Italian workers. To this purpose, we build up a novel data set combining information from two different sources: (1) matched employer-employee data based on administrative records from the Italian National Social Security Institute; and...

Italian households are suffering the crisis and retail banks should carefully consider the new scenario in order to develop appropriate strategies and customer relationships management techniques. A new Financial Vulnerability Index, based on different stress profiles and on the analysis of...

The objective of the paper is to test the effect of firm size and business experience on export performance. In fact, despite a growing number of empirical studies, the question of the relationship between these variables is not clearly established. This research aims at contributing to a better...

In this paper we test the empirical evidence of an impact of privatisation on output in the UK , through macroeconomic transmission channels. While most privatisation studies focus on microeconomic shocks, namely at firms' level, we are interested to see whether a large scale privatisation...