This paper analyses the role of tourism in the enhancement of local development focusing on the role of UNESCO World Heritage List (WHL) as attractor of tourism demand. It aims at evaluating the performance of the Italian regions as tourism destinations in the period 1995-2010, using the Data...

The Bologna Process promoted a wide-ranging reform of High Education systems in order to improve teaching activities throughout Europe. This paper evaluates the effect of these reforms on teaching efficiency of the Italian universities in the period 2000-2010. We employ the bootstrapped Data...

In the last few years, countries and commercial firms are increasingly interested in space activities for civil, military, and commercial purposes (Undseth et al., 2020). As it has been shown in NASA report (2019), investment in space program drives to significant economic benefits to the whole...

In this work, adopting a semi-parametric approach and a quasi-experiment setting, we empirically assess the effects of a reform of public procurement regulation in Italy, approved in 2011, that increased the discretion of bureaucrats in selecting the procurer. To this end, employing a large...

A large body of literature has analyzed the relationship between factors affecting institutional quality at local level and the efficiency of firms with a particular focus on the role of corruption. However, due to reverse causality, the endogeneity problem makes it difficult to identify the...

Government regulation plays a significant role in the field of heritage conservation. Namely, regulation is aimed at controlling the stock of heritage, restricting or modifying the activities of public as well as private actors. Surprisingly, the literature has neither extensively investigated...

The aim of this paper is to provide an empirical test of the role of competition in procurement in reducing the effects of corruption. For this purpose, the paper examines whether competition is able to constrain the waste effects of corruption on the efficiency of execution of public works,...

In the economic literature increasing attention is paid to the efficiency evaluation in the cultural sector. However, so far, the performance of archives is rarely investigated, notwithstanding their cultural and historical relevance. Indeed, the analysis of archives raises interesting...

The efficiency and effectiveness of judicial systems has become one of the main points of interest in public sector administration, due to the beneficial effects of an efficient judicial system on economic growth and firm competition. This is particularly relevant in Italy where judicial...

This paper focuses on the relationship between efficiency of infrastructure provision and the institutional characteristics of procurers. We study this relationship for the Italian public work procurement system characterized by a very large number of procurers mainly of small size. The...