The machine tool industry has a leading role in the Italian manufacturing system, above all in Northern Italy. This industrial branch is a strategic intermediate point in many manufacture dies, with an average innovation intensity higher than that of many other industrial branches. This work...

The recent financial crisis has led to a great level of environmental uncertainty and dramatically affected managers' expectations and firms' corporate strategies, including their acquisition moves. Building on a sample of 385 acquisitions in Italy in the period 2007-2010, the paper addresses...

The pressing nature of the issue of hunger and food insecurity, the first United Nations Millennium Development Goal, the fact that this MDG is far to be achieved by 2015 and the growing consensus around the inadequacy and ineffectiveness of the traditional approaches to tackle it, suggest that...

This paper employs the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (2004) to explore the relationship between participation in microcredit programs and women's empowerment using a structural equation model with categorical observed variables. A MCMC-based Bayesian approach is adopted for...

The effects of the recent economic recession have been widely discussed, particularly at the macro economic level. However, the economic downturn has been pervasive and has also determined a range of economic effects at different territorial levels. It has therefore become necessary to set up...

In a career-concern model of politics with endogenous candidacy and different types of politicians, following a decentralization reform, politicians with different skills are elected in municipalities characterized by different levels of autonomous resources. As an effect, consumer welfare...

In many, if not most, econometric applications, it is impossible to estimate consistently the elements of the white-noise process or processes that underlie the DGP. A common example is a regression model with heteroskedastic and/or autocorrelated disturbances,where the heteroskedasticity and...

Central banks' operations and eciency arguments would suggest that the intraday interest rate should be set to zero. However, a liquidity crisis introduces frictions related to news, which can cause an upward jump of the intraday rate. This paper documents that these dynamics can be partially...

The sciences tell us that fears are physical feelings and mental emotions that play a key role in any society. Not many issues related to fear are explored by economists today. The aim of this paper is to go backwards through the history of economic thought, and examine if and how Adam Smith...

We introduce a simple equilibrium model of a market for loans, where households lend to firms based on heterogeneous expectations about their loan default probability. Agents select among heterogeneous expectation rules, based upon their relative performance. A small fraction of pessimistic...