When the production of high quality needs the employment of qualified labour, firms' decisions concerning quality are affected by the extent to which skills are abundant. By means of a comparison between monopoly and perfect competition, we show how market power in such a context may entail a...

Voting games are characterized by the emergence of dominated strategies, that would be iteratively deleted by rational players. In this note we show, via an example, how applying iterated dominance retricts the set of equilibrium outcomes in Besley and Coate (1997) citizen-candidate model of...

In this paper we test the firm-specific determinants of delocation to low-wage countries on the part of Italian firms. We collect data through a survey on 167 firms the in mechanics and textile industries. Our data show that in recent years there has been an upsurge in FDI activity by Italian...

We incorporate equilibrium unemployment due to imperfect matching into a model of trade in intermediate inputs (Ethier (1982)). Firms are assumes to be price takers and their size is given by technology. Firms enter the market as long as expected profits cover the search cost they incur...

In this paper we illustrate the possible normative relevance of the links between human capital and financial assets via an example related to growth. When the financial structure is complete, growth is indeterminate because individual allocations between human capital and a tradable asset are...

Most of the reforms discussed within the framework of the Lisbon strategy will benefit public finances in the long term. However, in the short-term, there could a trade-off between some structural reforms and budgetary discipline. This possible tension between reforms and fiscal discipline was...