Culture is gaining increasing importance in the modern tourism industry, and represents a significant force of attraction for tourists (both domestic and international). Cultural tourism allows destinations and regions to expand their customer base, diversify their offer, extend the stay of the...

This paper investigates the 2011 Italian referendum on nuclear power as a clean laboratory for recovering information on the spatial pattern of votes about the construction (or restoration) of nuclear facilities. Our results show that voting preferences on building nuclear facilities are...

Numerous studies have been made of regional differences in income and level of development in Italy, and these studies basically differ in the responses they give to the question of whether the said differences were already of a substantial nature prior to Unification, or whether in fact they...

Public pension systems based on the Notional Defined Contribution (NDC) principle were introduced during the '90s in Italy, Sweden and Poland, among other countries. They mimic private savings, in that individuals get back, as pensioners, what they contributed to social security during working...

New entrepreneurial ventures may represent a viable and effective mechanism to transform academic knowledge into regional economic growth. We test this notion for the Italian provinces between 2001 and 2006. We evaluate three outputs of academic activities: teaching, research and Intellectual...

We use the last two waves of the Italian Time Use Survey to analyse the intergenerational transmission of reading habits. This can be explained by both cultural and educational transfers from parents to children and by imitative behaviour. Imitation is of particular interest, since it suggests...

The Italian co-operative enterprises have prospered in the last thirty years in various sectors. In this essay we analyze the role played by managerilization in allowing Italian co-ops to compete nationally and internationally with capitalist enterprises. On the basis of a substantial set of...

This paper claims that the 2011 Italian referendum on nuclear power is taking shape as a clean laboratory for the measurement of one of the main aspects of the NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) issue. Since the citizens voted on the possibility for the government to set up new nuclear plants in...

We empirically investigate whether the persistence of politicians in political institutions affects the innovation activity of firms. We use 12,000 firm-level observations from three waves of the Italian Observatory over Small and Medium Enterprises, and introduce a measure of political...

In this paper, we investigate possible sources of declining economic growth performance in Italy starting around the middle of the '90s. A long-run data analysis suggests that the poor performance of the Italian economy cannot be ascribed to an unfortunate business cycle contingency. The rest of...