The standard two-country model of international trade with monopolistic competition predicts a more-than-proportional relationship between a country's share of world production of a good and its share of world demand for that same good, a result known as the home market effect. We first show...

The paper consider the skill-biased "share-altering" technical change hypothesis in a spatial general equilibrium model where skilled and unskilled individual may exhibit different preferences for local amenities. A main novelty - both for labour and urban economics- is that, under this...

This paper considers the "share-altering" technical change hypothesis in a spatial general equilibrium model where individuals have different levels of skills. Building on a simple Cobb-Douglas production function, our model shows that the implementation of skill-biased technologies requires a...

In this paper, we study how contract enforcement at the local level affects a firm's ability to supply customised intermediate inputs to foreign firms. Using Italian firm-level data, we show that firms located in courts with higher judicial trial length in civil disputes, which is our measure of...

Activity and employment rates for immigrant women in many industrialised countries display a great variability across national groups. The aim of this paper is to assess whether this fact is due to a voluntary decision (i.e. large reservation wages by immigrants) or to an involuntary process...

In this paper we examine the long-term impact of natural disasters using the synthetic control approach and, in contrast with the previous literature, a within country perspective. Therefore, we are able to better geographically define the area hit by the quake, to mitigate the role of...

The paper attempts at disentangling the main sources of the rise in the Italian unemployment rate over the last four decades on the basis of a small model a la Layard-Nickell, identified and estimated using a structural VAR approach. Unemployment movements are assumed to be driven by fully...

This paper considers the case of Italy to analyze the short- and medium-term effect of a longer school day in primary school on both students' learning and mothers' labor supply. we rely on unique application-to-primary-school data: first, we control for parental preferences, proxied by...