In this paper we compare the magnitude of local productivity advantages associated to two different spatial concentration patterns in Italy, i.e. urban areas (UA) and industrial districts (ID). UA typically display a huge concentration of population and host a wide range of economic activities,...

Emigrants from Italy and Ireland contributed disproportionately to the Age of Mass Migration. That their departure improved the living standards of those they left behind is hardly in doubt. Nevertheless, a voluminous literature on the selectivity of migrant flows - both from sending and...

This paper leverages spatial and time-series variation in the population age structure of Italian regions to uncover the causal effect of demographic shifts on labour productivity. Such effect is analysed along a 'first-order' channel stemming from the direct relation between an individual's age...

Labor productivity convergence is a key factor in the catching up process of less developed regions. For the regional economies as a whole labor productivity differentials can be traced back to three distinct determinants: - composition effects due to the peculiar structure of the regional...

The supply of international air transport by low cost carriers (LCC) recorded a tenfold increase in Italy over the last decade. Such rapid expansion, by affecting transport costs, is likely to have induced significant effects on both the level and the composition of foreign tourism inflows. In...

A recent strand of the literature shows that the adoption of different lending technologies is associated with heterogeneous credit policies and performance. Using a unique Bank of Italy?s survey, specifically designed to capture some organizational features and the lending techniques adopted by...

Financial and banking systems play a crucial role for the reconstruction of war-worn countries, for the completion of the transition process and for the economic development. Financial systems in transitino countries had to be build from the scratch, often without any consolidated experience in...

Traditionally, scholars describe Italian industrial districts (IDs) as closed manufacturing systems of SMEs embedded in local contexts, able to interact with the outside only at the two ends of the value chain and where well-identified firms were in charge of managing the relationships with...

The study of possible asymmetric effects of monetary policy at a spatially disaggregated scale has recently received renewed attention in the literature due to the introduction of EMU. To quantify the differences in monetary policy transmission different econometric approaches have been...

Utilizing a novel econometric approach, routed around the identification and estimation of spatial panel VAR model, the paper provides new estimates of the dynamic effects of private and public R&D expenditure on innovative activity within European regions. The positive long run response of...