Public health experts caution that global warming increases the likelihood of novel coronaviruses and amplifies their impacts. Such contagions are virtually unique in their ability to inflict catastrophic worldwide harm. Even more alarming is the forecast that future coronavirus pandemics will...

The paper examines the impact of communication cost reductions on growth and welfare by means of an endogenous spatial growth model. Policy makers having to decide upon transport policies often claim certain policies such as infrastructure investments to have growth stimulating effects that...

We study a matching model with heterogenous agents, nontransferable utility and search frictions. Agents differ along a continuous horizontal dimension (e.g. taste) and a discrete vertical dimension, e.g. income. All individuals prefer the highest type along the vertical trait, but have...

The introduction of the hospital reimbursement based on diagnosis related groups (DRG) in 2004 has been a conspicuous attempt to increase hospital efficiency in Germany. We analyze possible determinants of hospital performance before and after the DRG introduction. A two-stage semi-parametric...

We develop a model to analyze the determinants and effects of an endogenous imperfect transferability of human capital on natives and immigrants. The model reveals that high migration flows and high skill-transferability are mutually interdependent. Moreover, we show that high mobility within a...

Individual OECD countries are in the process of legislating responses to the challenges posed by climate change. The prospect of rising carbon prices raises concerns in these nations of the impacts on the competitiveness of their own energy intensive industries and the potential for carbon...

This paper illustrates the story of the Port of Gioia Tauro, a major infrastructure investment co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund in the period 1994-1998, but whose origin dates back to the beginning of the 1970s. It draws from a recent ex-post evaluation carried out for the...

By focusing on the impacts of investment in the disaster areas for reconstruction on the demand-side effects, the purpose of this study is to measure the economic impacts and regional spillover effects of investment for reconstruction. After the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, government...

In recent years there have been frequent efforts to analyse the systems for providing public production and propose to increase the productivity and find alternative service-delivery mechanisms based on public-choice assumptions and perspectives. It is used an approach New public services, which...

Is welfare economics still possible, when preferences are endogenously determined? The answer is yes, if and only if the hypothesis of adaptive preferences is correct. If preferences satisfy the conditions of continuity, non-satiation and regularity, then adaptive preferences imply that...