This paper specifies and estimates a structural dynamic model of consumer demand for new and used durable goods. Its primary contribution is to provide an explicit estimation procedure for transaction costs, which are crucial to capturing the dynamic nature of consumer decisions. In particular,...

Gravelle shows that delay in legal process causes the costs of justice increase and reduces the demand for justice. In this work we test Gravelle's argument for Italy by analysing the relationship between the number of new appeals and the average delay in the corresponding disputes at first...

Budget law 24 December 2007, n. 244 introduces, for the first time into Italian law system, a type of class action (called "azione collettiva risarcitoria") for awards of compensatory damages or payments of amounts to multiple individual users or consumers

The recent US Supreme Court decision in American Express v. Italian Colors Restaurant threatens to gut private antitrust enforcement in the United States by replacing it with ineffective forms of arbitration. The Court's logic that the right to pursue a claim does not include a right to prove it...

Disputes over penalties for breach of contract are often solved in court. A simple model shows how inefficient courts may induce public buyers to refrain from enforcing penalties for late delivery to avoid litigation, inducing sellers to delay. Using a large dataset on Italian public...

The legal system can be treated as a large market where justice is traded in terms of legal disputes. Empirical evidence underlines that demand for legal assistance raises over time, despite high costs connected to filing, not only in Italy but also elsewhere in Europe. Moreover, the demand for...

Since the mid 1960s Italy has concluded bilateral investment treaties (BITs) with almost 100 countries. In the last fifteen years, there have been in excess of twenty (known) international arbitrations brought under Italian BITs. The underlying aim of the chapter is to assess the balance between...

In the national and supranational legal area, the need to address the ne bis in idem principle is justified by the growing interest aroused by the most recent pronouncements of the European Courts. The principle prohibits anyone who has already been acquitted or convicted in a previous trial...

In this paper, we conducted a two-stage analysis of technical efficiency in Italian judicial districts by focusing on civil cases in 2006. Unlike most of the works that apply the Data Envelopment Analysis technique to study the justice sector, in the first stage, we employed the smoothed...