In this paper «land take» and its drivers within the urbanization process is studied with a focus on recent developments in Italy. Several sources of information, recently made available by national and European agencies, are used to highlight the main characteristics of land take, its...

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 report summarizes the findings of a research project using firm level data on Italian and Turkish manufacturing industries. In this project we study the dynamics of firm survival and growth, and the spillover effects from foreign-owned to domestic firms. First, we investigate the...

Sebbene gli attuali scenari recessivi abbiano portato a un ulteriore ampliamento del divario di sviluppo dell’economia del Mezzogiorno dalle regioni centro-settentrionali, vi è un comparto di attività - quello delle energie rinnovabili - che ha fatto registrare in quest’ultimi anni tassi...

The main of this paper is to set up a model able to embody some peculiarity of the Italian unionised labour market with regard to employment determination. The impact of unions on employment is measured both through direct and indirect effects via wages. Moreover, the theoretical framework used...

In a previous paper (O'Higgins, 1994) I looked at the effects that participation on the Youth Training Scheme (YTS) in Britain had on young people's chances of finding work. The discussions of YTS in that paper suggest that wages might be a second suitable indicator of the effectiveness of YTS....

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...