In recent years, voter ID laws and convenience voting have generated heated partisan debates. To shed light on these policy issues, we survey the recent evidence on the institutional determinants and effects of voter turnout and broaden the perspective beyond the most debated rules. We begin by...

Although Italy was amongst the most enthusiastic founding members of the European Economic Community in 1957, the Italian capacity to respect the imperatives of European integration could not, and, still, cannot, be given for granted, as the recent sovereign debt crisis demonstrates. Apart from...

The purpose of this paper is to offer empirical evidence on the impact generated by investment subsidies awarded to industrial firms on employment, sales, investments and labor productivity. The analysis is based on unique firm-level administrative data provided by the Italian National...

This paper quantifies the effect of a local labor demand shock in the tradable sector on the employment in the non-tradable sector for Italy. Following Moretti (2010) and Moretti and Thulin (2013) we analyse for Italy's case the effect on the employment in tradable and non-tradable sector due to...

Regional research has focused on the innovation-competitiveness-growth chain, which is implicit in Territorial Innovation Systems. This literature has neglected or subordinated social and ecological regional conditions. We see this study as a first step towards more systematic research on what...

In this paper we study how the determinants of regional commuting in Italy have evolved in the past fifteen years. Using labour force data from 1992 to 2008 we estimate a model where the probability of commuting is regressed on a wide set of individual, job, firm and regional characteristics....

Introduction There is a large consensus that the amount of human capital in areas plays a crucial role for regional economic development. Previous evidence on regional economics highlight that a higher concentration of human capital is associated with more population, employment growth, income...

Local systems are conglomerations of municipalities held together by commuting links. ? Are they real life objects or the result of some cryptic algorithm? Real life objects. Real life cities, to be precise, even if not made of brick and mortar, but of relationships. Relationships is the matter...

We investigate the effectiveness of European Structural Funds on employment, population and house prices in Local Labor Markets (LLM) located in Southern Italy. We exploit the variability in disbursements between 2007 and 2013 and estimate the impact of the interventions by allowing for...

The European Union has a common rural development policy, motivated by the fact that more than 90% of the entire European territory can be classified as rural and 56% of European citizens live in rural areas. Each Member State sets out a Rural Development Programme (RDP) focused on three main...