The relevance of scope economies is central in the unbundling of competitive tendering introduced for the assignment of franchised monopolies in LPT services, concerning either urban or intercity local transport.<BR> We present a number of different cost specifications. The separable quadratic and...

A growing number of Local Public Transport (LPT) companies diversify their production lines by providing a large set of services. We investigate the cost structure of a sample of LPT companies operating in Italy and assess the presence and the magnitude of scope economies. We split the whole...

This article examines the potential impact of ownership on the cost of bus service provision for a sample of 65 private and 12 public companies providing local public transit (LPT) in Piedmont (Italy) from 1998 to 2002. A translog cost frontier is estimated using the model in Battese and Coelli...

This paper deals with a controversial question: Can innovation create unemployment? Theoretical frameworks and empirical evidences on that topic provide quite different results, depending on the socio-economic and institutional contest where the innovation is introduced and the type of...

In this paper we study the incidence of specific taxes in the Italian fuel markets, and exploit these findings to simulate the effects of fiscal policies aimed at mitigating oil price fluctuations. We estimate several reduced-form specifications, using as dependent variables the equilibrium...

The aim of this paper is to survey the recent empirical IO literature analysing differentiated products markets. The focus is restricted to the discrete choice approach that is carefully described and some recent applications of the full random coefficients model are analysed. The full random...

As an answer to soaring oil prices, stabilization mechanisms based on specific taxes, such as the French Tipp flottante, have been discussed and introduced in some countries in early 2000s, but then soon abandoned. Our contribution aims at analysing the excise pass-through and the cost shifting...

Using a novel country-industry level panel database with information on newly incorporated firms in 17 European countries between 1997 and 2004, we study how taxation of corporate income affects the size of entrants at the country-industry level. Our results, which are robust to changes in...

Can tax policy foster the creation of new companies? To answer this question, we assemble a novel country-industry level panel database with data on entry (by incorporation) for 17 European countries between 1997 and 2004. Our analysis is based on recent models of how corporate taxation affects...

Can tax policy foster the creation of new companies? To answer this question, we assemble a novel country-industry level panel database with data on entry (by incorporation) for 17 European countries between 1997 and 2004. Our analysis is based on recent models of how corporate taxation affects...