What determines multinational firms' location choices in Europe? Do national boundaries matter in location decisions? To what extent are European regional policies (Structural and Cohesion Funds) able to mitigate the agglomeration forces at work? Do location determinants differ for EU and US...

This paper studies FDI location determinants in Italy. FDI measures are the frequencies of acquisitions and greenfield investments per province and sector, so count data models are applied. The results show that the location determinants strongly differ according to the type of investment...

Italy was unified in 1861. As part of the process of nation-building, a free and mandatory national primary school system was established. While the new school system greatly contributed to the modernization of the country, its initial design did not reduce considerably regional disparities in...

In this paper we suggest an alternative estimator and an alternative graphical analysis, both developed by Hyndman et al. (1996), to describe the law of motion of cross-sectional distributions of per-capita income and its components in Europe. This estimator has better properties than the kernel...

Foreign direct investments in Europe have grown substantially over the last decade, but Italian regions account for a very small portion of such increase. Why does Italian regions attract such a low number of foreign investors? Is it a regional or a country problem? One explanation for this...

The existence and persistence of large spatial disparities in un-employment within national economies is a central issue in regional economics. Previous empirical analyses have largely disregarded the role of fundamentals. On the contrary in this paper we explore the link between labour...

This article investigates the pricing-to-market (PTM) behaviour of Italian exporting firms, using quarterly survey data by sector and by region over the period 1999q1 to 2005q2. A partial equilibrium imperfect competition model provides the structure according to which the orthogonality of...

The unemployment dynamics in the Mezzogiorno of Italy seem to corroborate the New Economic Geography predictions, whereby, under some specific hypotheses, a stronger economic integration can amplify the regional polarisation of unemployment rates in Europe. It is, however, unclear which features...

We propose a geoadditive negative binomial model (Geo-NB-GAM) for regional count data which allows us to simultaneously address some important methodological issues, such as spatial clustering, nonlinearities and overdispersion. We apply this model to study location determinants of inward...

The regional distribution of labour productivity in Western Europe is characterised by a Core-Periphery spatial pattern: high (low) productivity regions are in a proximate relationship with other high (low) productivity regions. Over the period 1980 to 2003, intra-distribution dynamics has...