The paper examines Minsky’s reflections on policies designed to act as a countervailing force against crises by fostering “responsible” Big Government, in which the role of the State is profoundly revised and directed towards full and stable non-inflationary employment, and also enabled to...

We propose a new index for measuring the systemic risk of default of the banking sector, which is based on a homogeneous version of multivariate intensity based models (Cuadras – Augé distribution). We compute the index for 10 European countries, exploiting the information incorporated in the...

The aim of this paper is to assess the importance of economic institutions, measured by an index built from the E.B.R.D. (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development) indicators, for the pattern of economic growth. Though it focuses on a particular set of transition economies, it is also...

Limited literature has been published on the association between environmental health indicators, life-style habits and ambient air pollution. We have examined the association of asthma prevalence and the amount of health investment with daily mean concentrations of particulate matter (PM) with...

This paper investigates the determinants of R&D investment at the firm-level. A balanced panel of 215 Italian manufacturing firms over the 1995-2000 period has been used to test the technologypush, the demand-pull and the endogenous skill-bias hypotheses. Econometrically, the GMM-SYS estimator...

This paper discusses the determinants of product innovation in young innovative companies (YICs) by looking at in-house and external R&D and at the acquisition of external technology in its embodied and disembodied components. These ‘innovative’ input-output relationships are tested on a...

In this paper we report evidence on the relationship between trade openness, technology adoption and the relative demand for skilled labour in the Turkish manufacturing sector, using firm level data over the period 1980-2001. In a dynamic panel data setting, using a unique database comprising...

We merge contributions from the New Urban Economics and inequality measurement to assess quality of life (QOL) in a given city. We take the point of view of a city planner in favor of an even accessibility to amenities within the city. Instead of the average value of amenities computed in the...

In the very recent past, the Lombardy health care system - established on the quasi-market model – has caught the interest of researchers and politicians in different OECD countries1. The merits of the model, compared to other Italian regional models, are the control of health care spending...