Since Putnam's work on social capital, the Italian regional case has been a very rich source of both data and theories about the origins of large and persistent differences in local stocks of social capital, and about the impact of such differences on economic performances. The Italian case is...

By studying the interaction between social capital and decentralization, we show that political decentralization can be a source of divergence across heterogeneous regions. In particular, we claim that since the local endowments of social capital display their effect on the economy mainly...

We explore the links between the halt of the convergence process of Italian regions at the beginning of the 1970s and the increase in regional unemployment dispersion. We consider a neoclassical exogenous growth model with an imperfect labor market and show that during the transitional dynamics...

We present an overlapping generation growth model with an imperfect labor market where the links among crime, growth and unemployment are jointly considered, both in an endogenous and exogenous set-up. We test the major implications of our theory and verify the two model specifications through...

In this paper we propose a growth model with an imperfect labor market in which the accumulation of human capital is the output of a learning-by-doing process where scholastic knowledge must be combined with working experience. The dynamic steady state of the model implies a negative...

This paper proposes an endogenous growth model that establishes a negative relationship between the concentration of the non cumulative factor, namely land but also natural resources in general, and long run growth and that offers a theoretical background for redistribution policies such as land...

In this paper we reconstruct the macro regional government deficits of Italy and find that the aggregate deficit resulting from our estimates captures quite well the entire dynamics of the Italian national public deficit. This new data set shows that the ultimate cause of the accumulation of...