This paper examines the convergence of regional business cycles in the decades that followed Italy's Unification. The aggregate construction series point to cyclical convergence, but a sectorlevel analysis traces this result to the decline in differentiated "regional-policy" shocks. The regional...

The paper studies the motivations behind banks’ shareholding of non-financial firms using a panel of large Italian companies in the period 1994-2000. Empirical evidence shows that banks are shareholders of companies that are less profitable, have experienced slower growth, are more indebted...

Supporting value judgements about policies and programmes is a central task in evaluation. There is, however, little consensus on how evaluators are to accomplish this task.The traditional cost-benefit approaches were found wanting and yet valuation as promoted by checklists or qualitative...

This paper analyzes the dynamic properties of the Taylor rule with the zero lower bound on the nominal interest rate in an optimizing monetary model with overlapping generations. The main result is that the presence of wealth effects is not sufficient to rule out the possibility of infinite...

This paper provides a unifying framework in which the coexistence of different form of common cyclical features can be tested and imposed to a cointegrated VAR model. This goal is reached by introducing a new notion of common cyclical features, namely the weak form of polynomial serial...

This paper analyzes merchant markets in the presence of vertically-integrated firms. We discuss when vertical integration tends to increase the elasticity of (derived) demand in the merchant market because of indirect contraints arising from the retail market. We also discuss the relevance of...

The aim of the paper is to shed some light on consumers' attitudes to adopting strategies to contain the cost of medication. Using micro-data from an ad hoc survey conducted in Italy and the UK, several hypotheses are tested regarding patients' decision-making behavior and how it is influenced...

We investigate the relationship between money and happiness across the waves of the British Household Panel Study by using a latent class approach which accounts for slope heterogeneity, omitted variable bias and departures from normality assumptions. Our findings reveal the presence of a vast...

Charges for health services help contain healthcare costs. Despite showing that medicine consumption decreases when charges are increased research has not yet identified how doctors 'manage' the charge system to help patients who cannot afford treatment. This paper describes how the charge...

The aim of this research is to investigate the relationship between obesity and wages, using data for nine countries from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) over the period 1998-2001. We improve upon the existing literature by adopting a Quantile Regression approach to characterize...