The article explores the effects of cultural heritage in fostering tourism demand. We look at the role of UNESCO World Heritage List (WHL) in the enhancement of tourism destinations (TDs) competitiveness. In such a perspective, taking Italian regions in the period 1995–2010 as a case study,...

Die Lissabon-Agenda sieht eine Steigerung der Ausgaben für Forschung und Entwicklung bis zum Jahr 2010 auf drei Prozent des Bruttoinlandsprodukts vor. Europa will damit zu einem der wettbewerbsfähigsten und dynamischsten Wirtschaftsräume werden. Wesentlich für die Zukunftsfähigkeit eines...

We use extreme-value theory to estimate the ultimate world records for the 100m running, for both men and women. For this aim we collected the fastest personal best times set between January 1991 and June 2008. Estimators of the extreme-value index are based on a certain number of upper order...

This paper empirically investigates whether donor countries punish sovereign defaults by reducing foreign aid ows. Our findings reject the hypothesis formulated in the theoretical literature that a default leads to a loss of foreign aid for the defaulting country. Creditor countries directly...

In recent years stock exchanges have been increasingly diversifying their operations into related business areas such as derivatives trading, post-trading services and software sales. This trend can be observed most notably among profit-oriented trading venues. While the pursuit for...

Academic contributions on the demutualization of stock exchanges so far have been predominantly devoted to social welfare issues, whereas there is scarce empirical literature referring to the impact of a governance change on the exchange itself. While there is consensus that the case for...

We analyse pricing, effort and tipping decisions in the online service Google Answers. While users set a price for the answer to their question ex ante, they can additionally give a tip to the researcher ex post. In line with the related experimental literature we find evidence that tipping is...

In this paper, we perform a Tobit analysis of aid allocation, covering the period 1999-2002 and accounting for both altruistic and selfish donor motives. It turns out that poorer countries get clearly more aid from both bilateral and multilateral donors. Most donors are also found to direct...

The present paper adds to the already large existing literature on aid distribution as it runs an equation on bilateral aid allocation on a very rich dataset, covering 20 years (1980-99), 22 donors and 137 recipients, which permits a three-dimensional panel study (recipient-year-donor) and...

In this paper, we perform a Tobit analysis of aid allocations, covering the period 1999-2002 and accounting for both altruistic and selfish donor motives. We first compare the allocative behavior of all bilateral donors taken together with that of multilateral aid agencies, and then look at nine...