This paper studies the impact of size on labor cost and productivity for Italian manufacturing firms. The distributions of both labor cost and productivity display a wide support, even when disaggregated by sector of industrial activity. Further, both labor cost and productivity, when considered...

Among the many studies on migration before the Great War, Italy has received little attention, with a few notable exceptions and without providing a convincing explanation of its economic and demographic determinants. Standard neoclassical approaches explain emigration as driven by relative...

We investigate how cooperative firms reacted to the current crisis. This allows us to compare the behavior of cooperative and conventional firms facing exogenous shifts in demand. After a short survey of a stream of theoretical literature, we analyze a large group of Italian production...

The limited partnership emerged as a key societal innovation during the early modern age. It allowed an effective separation between partners - those acting and those conferring capital - and it granted limited liability to partners in case of insolvency. The diffusion of limited partnership -...

Socio-economic performance differs not only across countries but within countries too and can persist even after religion, language, and formal institutions are long shared. One interpretation of these disparities is that successful regions are characterized by higher levels of trust, and, more...

Self-financing has often been seen as an important source for research-and-development (R&D) funding. However, an in-depth comparison between the determinants of self-financing in the case of traditional investments versus those in R&D has not been provided yet. We use a comprehensive data set...

Utilizing a novel econometric approach, routed around the identification and estimation of spatial panel VAR model, the paper provides new estimates of the dynamic effects of private and public R&D expenditure on innovative activity within European regions. The positive long run response of...

We use 6 waves of the Bank of Italy's Survey on household income and wealth (SHIW) to check the evolution of workers' expectations on future pension benefits and retirement age from 2000 to 2012. Based on these two subjective evaluations, we compute a measure of expected pension benefit and...

The rise in destination accessibility and the emergence of new market segments have increased the competition among tourism destinations, both at national and international level. In order to gain a significant competitive advantage over competitors, destinations increasingly make use of signals...