Barriers to homeownership have traditionally been an important research and policy issue. In particular, the role of income volatility and credit constraints have been one of the main focuses in this concern. In this paper we test for the first time whether the underlying nature behind the...

The extremely large disparities in employment rates across Italian regions, and the bad performance of the Italian economy in terms of job creation in the 80´s and early 90´s make job creation a top-priority in the economic policy agenda. This paper uses data on employment from 784 Local Labor...

The question of the spatial impacts of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has animated intellectual and policy debate for a long time. At the beginning of the 1990s the advent of the Internet brought a new surge of debate: it was argued that the Internet would free the economy from...

The Economy of the Italian Regions in the year 2005 analyzes the evolution of production, labour market, financial aggregates and regional public finances in the four main Italian territorial areas. Topics analyzed focus on structural change in the Italian economy; trends in Mezzogiorno's...

The recent dismal performance of overall job creation has left Italy, as of the end of the 90's, with very low participation and high unemployment rates. Moreover, Italy exhibits a large regional dispersion of those variables when compared to similar European Union economies. The present paper,...

Since the second half of the '90s, investment incentives channeled through the Law 488 have represented the main policy instrument for reducing territorial disparities in Italy. From 1996 to 2003, the total amount of funds distributed to industrial firms has accounted for 16 billions of Euro...

To explain the concentration of human capital in cities, urban theory conjectures that the metropolitan scale provides two sources of returns for the more educated: production benefits, both in terms of wages and non-monetary gains, and consumption benefits. By exploiting a unique survey on...

Introdotti nel 1996, i Patti Territoriali (PT) hanno rappresentato il principale strumento di programmazione negoziata in Italia. Un PT è un accordo tra rappresentanti delle amministrazioni locali, imprenditori e sindacati dei lavoratori per la realizzazione di progetti imprenditoriali e...

In Italy, Patti Territoriali (Territorial Pacts) are one of the main government-sponsored programmes to foster growth in disadvantaged areas. A territorial pact is an agreement among the local authorities and representatives of civil society (mainly entrepreneurs and trade unions) of a number of...