We study the connection between economic performance and the quality of government institutions for the sample of 103 Italian NUTS3 regions, including new measures of institutional quality calculated using data on the provision of four areas of public service - health, educational...

This paper introduces a methodology to describe and compare the economic relative performance of the hospitality sector of the Italian regions during the period 2000-2004. Dynamics of the hospitality sector of each region is represented by the evolution of its economic efficiency. The...

Environment and sustainability are key issues for the policy maker. A policy should be first designed and realistically inserted in his proper context (regional, national, european) in order to be correctly assessed. After that, suitable models need to be choose consistently with the policy...

The aim of this paper is to assess the role played by creativity and other components of human capital on the process of economic growth for 257 regions in the 27 member countries of the European Union. We first decompose the regional human capital endowment to distinguish between the...

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that, for the case of Italy, ceteris paribus, tourist areas tend to have a greater amount of crime than non-tourist ones in the short and long run. Following the literature of the economics of crime à la Becker (Crime and Punishment - An Economic...

While it is well established to think of international tourism as a type of exports, namely ‘home’ exports, the potential of tourism flows as an engine for fostering trade among countries is a poorly studied topic. In this paper we show that this relationship can be studied at a very...

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the effect of various proximity dimensions on the innovative capacity of 276 regions in Europe within a knowledge production function model, where R&D and human capital are included as the main internal inputs. We combine the standard geographical...

This paper analyses residents’ perception toward cruise tourism development and its externalities. The research involved a primary data collection in Messina, during the summer peak of the cruise season in 2011. A correspondence analysis on the local residents’ perceptions shows that...

In this paper we analyze a fiscal mechanism used in Italy, which in Italian is called “Studi di Settore” (Sector Studies). This mechanism relies on information gathered on taxpayers to both partition the population into fairly homogeneous clusters and to determine the presumed income they...

In this paper we introduce a weighted Z-estimator for moment condition models in the presence of auxiliary information on the unknown distribution of the data under the assumption of weak dependence. The resulting weighted estimator is shown to be consistent and asymptotically normal. Its small...