The first goal of this work is to collect available physical geographic data on islands and to elaborate measures of insularity. We then evaluate whether and when insularity can become ‘bad’ geography in terms of poor economic performance. We find that two important dichotomies are present -...

The paper investigates the impact of distance, contiguity and technological proximity on cross- regional knowledge flows, by comparing the evidence concerning co-inventorship, applicant-inventor relationships and citation flows. We find evidence of significant differences across these diverse...

We use a panel of European firms to investigate the relationship between intangible assets and productivity. We disentangle between tfp and technology adoption, while available studies so far have considered only a notion of productivity conflating the two effects. To this aim, we estimate...

Gambling represents a channel through which some relevant aspects of our social life, such as audacity, competition and risk, manifest themselves. Gambling is both a pleasing diversion and a way of socialisation, where gratification and problematic issues alternate. Most gamblers are social...

How does the availability of unregulated market-based channels for the circulation of liquidity in the financial system affect the process of financial integration? To answer this question, I develop a two-country model of banking, where the banks have access to country-specific investment...

The recent literature on time series has developed a lot of models for the analysis of the dynamic conditional correlation, involving the same variable observed in different locations; very often, in this framework, the consideration of the spatial interactions are omitted. We propose to extend...

Empirical evidence of the marginal deterrent effect is provided. Exploring a data set of kidnapping crimes in Sardinia between 1960 and 2012 changes in Italian policy regarding sanctions for kidnapping and their associated impact on murders is considered. Deaths associated with kidnappings...

Economic and environmental efficiency has being receiving growing attention among researchers. In general terms, this concept is related to the capability of the economic systems to employ natural resources efficiently, so as to increase economic and human wealth. This clearly implies that both...

Recent econometric and statistical models for the analysis of volatility in financial markets serve the purpose of incorporating the effect of other markets in their structure, in order to study the spillover or the contagion phenomena. Extending the Multiplicative Error Model we are able to...

This paper studies the equilibrium dynamics of a growth model with public finance where two different allocations of public resources are considered. The model simultaneously determines the optimal shares of consumption, capital accumulation, taxes and composition of the two different public...