In the inheritance tax debates of the 1920s the proposals formulated by theItalian philosopher Eugenio Rignano occupied a prominent position. Since then, his contribution has been largely, although not completely, forgotten. This paper reviews the Rignano’s ideas by focusing upon its...

We challenge the widely held belief that New-Keynesian models cannot predict optimal positive inflation rates. In fact these are justi…fied by the Phelps argument that monetary fi…nancing can alleviate the burden of distortionary taxation. We obtain this result because, in contrast with...

By viewing trade unions as economic units analogous to firms, which can be studied by applying the standard tools of microeconomic analysis, this article aims to derive the optimal degree of union centralization in a multi-unions simple general equilibrium model. Differently from previous...

L’ambiente per sua natura è un bene pubblico e la sua tutela richiede, quindi, qualche tipo d’intervento. L’uso delle risorse naturali per attività economiche, anziché a fini di protezione ambientale, ad esempio, può essere regolato a livello di comunità locale per evitare un...

In a unionized economy with endogenous fiscal policy central bank transparency has two contrasting effects on wages, the relative strength of which determines the macroeconomic performance. This finding allows us to demonstrate that (i) if the central bank is populist the effect of transparency...

This paper generalizes the classical theory of economic policy to a static LQ-strategic context between n players. We show how this generalized version of controllability can profitably be used to deal with policy ineffectiveness issues and Nash equilibrium existence.

This paper investigates the effects of cooperation (corporatism) on macroeconomic performance by considering a rather standard policy game between the government and a monopoly union. We stress the shortcomings of the traditional way used to model cooperation in policy games (the maximization of...

In this paper we consider a standard policy game between the Government and a union. In such a framework, we first investigate the effects of corporatism on macroeconomic performance vis-à-vis different kinds of non-co-operative equilibria. Afterwards, we introduce in the literature the issue...