It is well-known that Italy has two distinguishing characteristics closely intertwined with each other and unusual for an advanced country: a persisting specialization in traditional industries and deep internal disparities. The Italian "anomaly" is rooted in the predominance of clusters of...

Italy has been characterized, throughout its history as a unified country, by large regional differentials in the levels of income, industrialization and socio-economic development. This paper aims at testing the New Economic Geography hypothesis on the role of market access in explaining these...

In this paper we estimate the long-run relationship between regional total factor productivity, R&D, human capital and public infrastructure between 1980 and 2001. We take advantage of recent developments panel cointegration techniques that control for endogeneity of regressors to estimate...

The paper is an analysis based on statistical indicators for three European economies with highly developed tourism sectors. France, Italy and Spain are models of growth and development through tourism, which is possible due to their cultural, historical and artistic richness. Although they are...

This paper investigates to what extent the different subsectors of the knowledge economy are subject to sector-specific spatial patterns of employment dynamics, and whether these patterns are conditional upon the general economic climate in a particular region. To this end, we analyze and...

We investigate the causal relationship between judicial efficiency and firm size across Italian municipalities exploiting spatial discontinuities in court jurisdictions for identification. The estimated coefficients suggest that the reduction of the length of civil proceedings could exert, all...

The present study explores the impact exerted by a series of factors and processes including creativity, IPR activities, new business formation and the provision of amenities on economic growth for 103 Italian provinces (NUTS 3) over the period between 2001 and 2006. Provincial growth rates are...

Italy has been typically viewed as a strongly heterogeneous country in terms of regional and sub-regional economic performances. On investigating such heterogeneity, this paper examines the determinants of Italian population growth at the urban level between 1991 and 2008. The empirical analysis...

This paper carries out an empirical assessment of the relationship between social capital and labour productivity in small and medium enterprises in Italy. By means of structural equations models, the analysis investigates the effect of different aspects of the multifaceted concept of social...

The paper estimates the local effects of urban regeneration policies by using evidence from interventions that took place in small and medium-sized cities in the Centre and North of Italy over the period 2008-12. By using an Oaxaca-Blinder reweighting estimator, we find little support for the...