The Analytic Hierarchy Process (Saaty 1977, 1980) is a decision-making procedure for establishing priorities in multi-criteria decision making. Underlying the AHP is the theory of ratio-scale measures developed by psychophysicist Stanley S. Stevens (1946, 1951) in the middle of the last century....

We study individual behaviour in a repeated linear public good experiment in which, in each period, subjects are required to contribute a minimum level and face a certain probability to be audited. Audited subjects who contribute less than the minimum level are convicted to pay the difference...

After reading Richard Florida’s work (e.g. Florida, 2003) on the creative industry and on the importance of the creative class for urban development in post-industrial economies, many cities in Europe and the USA have started to invest in creativity in general and in design in particular. Much...

Medical tourism is a term to describe the rapidly-growing practice of traveling across international borders to obtain health care. Services typically sought by travelers include elective procedures as well as complex specialized surgeries. Over 50 countries have identified medical tourism as a...

Simple growth accounting shows that the negative scale effect of economic growth on the environment can be compensated by a composition effect, increasing the weight of less polluting productions, and by a technical progress favorable to the environment, in order to make possible a sustainable...

The Federal Reserve System or the Fed is one of the most prestigious institutions in the world. Founded by the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, the Fed has the responsibility of setting the monetary policy of the U.S. The Fed’s actions affect the money supply in the U.S. market which has a direct...

In an enlarged Europe of the regions, the need for EU policies to possess an explicit territorial dimension is undeniable. This paper, by analysing the fundamentals of the EU policies in the previous 2000-2006 and the current 2007-2013 planning period, looks at the implications of strengthening...

The goal of this paper is to present an original and simple analysis aimed to understand why investing in capital markets can be very dangerous for “naive investors”. Stock markets are characterized by instability and subjected to external shocks. The probability of making money on them is...

The goal of this project is to deeply investigate on the main causes of the global economic and financial crises and, based on a theoretical framework, to describe a suitable optimal monetary policy. According to our empirical analysis (basically based on US data) we will prove that a mix of...

We study smoking persistence, which can be due to both true state dependence and individual unobserved heterogeneity, in ten European countries. We distinguish between the two sources of persistence by using semi-parametric dynamic panel selection methods, applied to both smoking participation...