Has deflation contributed to the long lasting stagnation of the Japanese economy? Could the Bank of Japan have stopped deflation by implementing a more expansionary monetary policy? Our tentative answers are probably not to the first question, and probably yes to the second question. We find...

The Telecoms Boom and Bust 1996 to 2002 has had a significant impact on the structure of the Telecommunications Industry. During the boom it seemed as if new entrant telecoms operators, entering on the back of new technologies, might even replace the incumbent operators such as Telecom Italia,...

Beginning in 1989, the European Union started targeting its Structural Funds business incentives geographically to industrial areas that have been facing above average unemployment and industrial job loss. Although billions of euros have been invested in these Objective 2 areas, very little is...

The purpose of this paper is to introduce and adopt a generalised version of Roemer's (1998) Equality of Opportunity (EOp) framework for analysing optimal income taxation. EOp optimal tax rules seek to equalise income differentials arising from factors beyond the control of the individual....

Di recente l’analisi austriaca del ciclo economico è stata oggetto di rinnovato interesse: contrariamente alla maggior parte delle analisi tradizionali, infatti, la visione originaria di Mises non spiega il ciclo richiamandosi a shock esogeni o a illusioni di cui sarebbero vittime gruppi di...

The Misesian lesson in a transition framework leads to a number of questions about the very aims pursued by individuals as they switched from the communist regime to a so-called capitalist environment. According to the answers provided, one may then understand why so many candidates to...

This paper compares and contrasts the United States federal Empowerment Zone and European Union Objective 2 programs that geographically target economic revitalization incentives. Since 1989, both programs have designated predominately industrial or urban areas as being distressed and worthy of...

We study the time series properties of the Fama-French factor returns volatility processes. Among the original findings of this paper, we point to structural breaks in the volatility of the factors, and strong coincidence between the timing of the breaks in the volatility of the market portfolio...

ICANN currently determines which top level domains are available on the A-root server and so restricts the choices facing Internet users. Thus ICANN redistributes wealth and has become the focus of rent-seeking activities. Yet, despite my belief that the Internet will become substantially more...

Although the importance of property rights as the engine of growth remains beyond dispute, this article tries to show that the crucial issue is not so much the definition of the allegedly ‘optimal’ property right system, as the understanding of the ideological elements that justify property...