Italian university system was reformed in 2001. This paper tests the screening role of degree scores for 2004-Italian graduates. We find support of the strong screening hypothesis for prereform type degrees, while we do not find any evidence of signalling effects for post-reform 3-years degrees....

I adopt the distribution dynamics framework to study labor productivity convergence, in the period 1980-1995, among 28 developed and developing countries, in different manufacturing sub-sectors, identified, as according their technological content into Resource Based, Low Technology, Medium...

This paper employs the distribution dynamics approach to investigate cross-regional convergence of GDP per worker in Italy, between 1980 and 2003. Two sets of competitive hypotheses are tested: absolute versus conditional and neoclassical versus technological. Supportive evidence of only...

The paper consists of an empirical analysis of the separate as well as joint impacts on total and youth unemployment of indicators of labour market policies on the one hand, and the financial crisis associated with the “Great Recession” on the other. In particular, we investigate labour...

Castagnetti, Rossi and Trapani (2014) propose two max-type statistics to test for the presence of a factor structure in a large stationary panel data model. We investigate the use of alternative approaches as average-type and Hausman-type statistics. We show that both approaches can not be used....

This paper assesses the importance of firms' financial resources that are necessary to overcome sunk entry costs associated with export. We propose a new methodology to identify \textit{a priori} constrained firms, exploiting a rich data-set on Italian firms' assets and liabilities. We provide...

The purpose of this paper is twofold; first, to present a simple proof of the Farkas theorem (or Farkas lemma or Farkas-Minkowski lemma), proof performed through a nonlinear theorem of the alternative; second, to present various new proofs of the so-called "Tucker key theorem", and to show that...

We give an overview and make some remarks on the approximate optimality conditions, for a nonlinear programming problem, given by Haeser and Schuverdt (2011) and by Fiacco and McCormick (1968a). Other first-order optimality conditions in absence of constraint qualifications are examined....

The Gross National Income (GNI) is often used as an indicator for a country’s living standards. Yet, it does not record unilateral transfers and notably remittances, which in the last decades have gained growing importance as a source of income for developing countries. Gross National...

In the recent years the Colombian economy grew relatively rapidly, but it was a biased growth. The energy sector (the locomotora minero-energetica, to use the rhetorical expression of President Juan Manuel Santos) grew much faster than the rest of the economy. The manufacturing sector registered...