The 2013 pension reform in Lithuania forced workers to choose their level of participation to the second pillar system. Three options were given - a lower contribution rate, a higher contribution rate with governmental subsidy, and to exit from the second pillar system. The aim of this article...

The paper analyzes the impact of domestic and international tourism on the economic growth process for 179 European regions. The econometric analysis is based on a spatial growth regression framework where the rate of GDP per capita growth at the regional level for the period 1999-2009 is...

We model a competitive labor market populated by workers who are heterogeneous in wealth and skills, in which education plays a signaling role. We show that whenever the accumulation of factors of production such has technology results in a wider wage premium for skills over time – as it might...

The first goal of this work is to collect available physical geographic data on islands and to elaborate measures of insularity. We then evaluate whether and when insularity can become ‘bad’ geography in terms of poor economic performance. We find that two important dichotomies are present -...

The paper investigates the impact of distance, contiguity and technological proximity on cross- regional knowledge flows, by comparing the evidence concerning co-inventorship, applicant-inventor relationships and citation flows. We find evidence of significant differences across these diverse...

We use a panel of European firms to investigate the relationship between intangible assets and productivity. We disentangle between tfp and technology adoption, while available studies so far have considered only a notion of productivity conflating the two effects. To this aim, we estimate...

Gambling represents a channel through which some relevant aspects of our social life, such as audacity, competition and risk, manifest themselves. Gambling is both a pleasing diversion and a way of socialisation, where gratification and problematic issues alternate. Most gamblers are social...

How does the availability of unregulated market-based channels for the circulation of liquidity in the financial system affect the process of financial integration? To answer this question, I develop a two-country model of banking, where the banks have access to country-specific investment...

The recent literature on time series has developed a lot of models for the analysis of the dynamic conditional correlation, involving the same variable observed in different locations; very often, in this framework, the consideration of the spatial interactions are omitted. We propose to extend...

Empirical evidence of the marginal deterrent effect is provided. Exploring a data set of kidnapping crimes in Sardinia between 1960 and 2012 changes in Italian policy regarding sanctions for kidnapping and their associated impact on murders is considered. Deaths associated with kidnappings...