Using a difference-in-differences approach, we exploit a quasi-experiment occurred in a large public university located in Southern Italy, to study whether the introduction of a selective admission test affects two indicators of students’ performances: dropout rate and grade point average...

This paper examines the determinants of innovation and its effects on small- and medium-sized firms We use the data from the OPIS databank, which provides a survey on a representative sample of firms from a province of the Southern Italy. We want to study whether small and medium sized firms can...

This paper analyses the impact of the speed of transition reforms on economic growth in transition countries in the context of the debate big-bang versus gradualist approach. It builds a new indicator for the speed of transition reforms based on a three-way principal component analysis. It shows...

Background: Data envelopment analysis (DEA) and the Malmquist index are frequently used in the hospital sector to measure efficiency. However, very few works are published for Italian hospitals, despite the fact that efficiency was the main driver guiding healthcare reform in the 1990s....

The aims of this article are to propose an overall index of social exclusion and to analyze its relationship with economic growth in European countries. We approach social exclusion as a multidimensional phenomenon by a three-mode principal components analysis (Tucker3 model). This method is...

The deadlock in the Doha Round and the proliferation of regional and bilateral trade agreements has given rise to a new interest in the potential relationship between regionalism and multilateralism. This paper has two main aims. First, the formation of free trade agreements amongst symmetric...

The impact of international trade on the labour market is a topic of growing interest among economists. In the last two decades income distribution has strongly changed in the USA with a progressive increase in the difference between the wages of skilled and unskilled workers. Even though West...

In this paper we appraise the existence of a negative relationship between the wage level and the unemployment rate (the wage curve) across Italian regions, using data from the Bank of Italy’s Survey on Household Income and Wealth. The main advantage of this data-set is the availability of...

The present paper analyses the probability of night work among Italian females. Using data from the 2010 LFS our results indicate that in Italy women's choices are affected by family structure: the probability of working at night is lower when children are less than two years of age, but it...

Since the pioneering contributions of Balassa (1966) and Grubel and Lloyd (1975) revealed a remarkable incidence of simultaneous exports and imports within industries (intra-industry trade) in the foreign trade structure of developed countries, a large body of academic work has expanded...