In 2011, Edoardo Nesi - a former industrialist of the Prato textile district - won the most prestigious Italian literary Prize for his autobiographical novel Storia della mia gente, a book centered upon Prato's past industrial success and present decline. Nesi has since become a regular...

The objective of this paper is to illustrate a potential problem in Samaritan's dilemmas: that Samaritans have a vested interest in encouraging parasitism. In effect, they gain from their altruism. To demonstrate this result, we show that the Nash equilibrium in a Samaritan's dilemma is a Pareto...

L'articolo esamina gli effetti redistributivi della dinamica dei prezzi e le conseguenze espansive/recessive che questa può avere sulla congiuntura. Si richiama l'attenzione sul ruolo del contesto istituzionale (concorrenza e regolamentazione) e sui costi di aggiustamento che ne seguono. Si...

America's constitutional structure relies on checks and balances to prevent a concentration of excessive discretionary power in the hands of any indi- vidual governmental official or body, promoting effective government while protecting individual liberty and state sovereignty. Federal courts...

Direct lending by multilateral development banks to the private sector without sovereign guarantee raises two important issues. First, their presence in the financial markets alters the perception of risk, and that difference in perceived risk carries a market value; the question becomes who...

Since price discrimination and selling below cost arise in the normal course of business and are usually legal for home firms, countering these practices by foreign firms provides a very weak rationale for antidumping duties. If antidumping duties were to provide a systematic defense against...

We analyze the interplay of political elites’ de facto power, democracy and education based on a theoretical framework inspired by the model in Acemoglu and Robinson (2006). We identify conditions under which the elite may overcompensate the loss of de jure power (as a result of political...

I perform Arellano-Bond GMM estimations using panel data over the period 1995-2008 and explore the growth effects of Africa’s trade with China, distinguishing between the effect of imports and the effect of exports, and controlling for the role of export concentration. Four important results...

The prolific (serial) inventors set up the core of the paper. Prolific inventors tend to have a high productivity in terms of inventions (patents) having in general more economic value. The capacity to produce a lot of inventions (patents) is termed “prolificness”. We want to deepen our...