Chinese consumers recognize in Italian products a high added value and, in some cases, consider them preferable to other products. The success around the world of items ‘‘Made in Italy'' is mostly due to the Italian brand's ability to transfer a certain sense of product quality in concert...

Several studies have shown a positive correlation between investment in machinery and equipment (M&E) and economic growth. For this reason, it is very important for policy-makers to study the dynamics of investments and their expected evolution over time through forecast scenarios. The paper...

We match data on the daily newspaper coverage of a sample of Italian listed companies with Nielsen data on the monthly amount of advertising that a given company has purchased on a given newspaper. Controlling for newspaper and company fixed effects, we show that newspaper coverage of a given...

This paper explores the determinants of the linkages between industry and research organizations – including universities. We present new evidence on three wine producing areas – Piedmont, a region of Italy, Chile, South Africa - that have successfully reacted to the recent structural...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the factors determining the “speed” of transition between a temporary/precarious job towards a stable one in the Italian regional labour markets. In this context the importance of individual human capital is widely recognized by the economic...

By focusing on the Italian case concerning the ‘extraordinary rendition' (or in precise legal terms, the abduction) of Mr Abu Omar, this article addresses the obligations states have under the UN Torture Convention to prosecute individuals for torture and complicity in torture occurring as a...

The EMU assigns a very marginal role to economic policy and relies on the leading idea that, if prices are kept constant, there will be an automatic convergence towards long-run equilibrium income. These beliefs represent the theoretical underpinnings of fiscal and monetary policy strategies in...

The Italian and German banking systems shared similar characteristics early in the 1990s but have evolved in different directions since then: Italy privatized its publicly-owned banks while Germany has maintained a large share of state-owned savings banks. Contemporaneously, banks in both...

We prove that in a closed economy without distortionary taxation, the welfare of a representative consumer is summarized to a first order by the current and expected future values of the Solow productivity residual in level and by the initial endowment of capital. The equivalence holds if the...

This paper investigates the effects of the increasing activity of foreign banks in Italy, distinguishing between credit granted to households and firms. Foreign banks display a differentiated degree of business expansion across the provinces, we exploit this variability to measure how foreign...