This Working Paper contains the contributions written in English forthcoming in a Special Issue of the Journal of Industrial and Management Economics / Economia e politica industriale (39, (2), 2012 ). The title (and the topic) of the whole Special Issue is “Competitiveness in Manufacturing:...

This paper uses Local Labour Market Areas (LLMA) data to investigate the dynamics of employment in the Information Technology (IT) sector in Italy 2001-2005. Adopting the framework suggested by Glaeser et al. (1992) and Combes (2000), the aim is to test if agglomeration forces might...

In the real world, many social and economic interactions are highly affected by coordination problems. These, in turn, emerge from the trial to dynamically organize strategies of collective action in complex contexts where agents and groups are heterogeneous and information is only imperfectly...

A framework for duality theory is set forth, based on the model-independent role of homotheties. An expansion vector field is introduced as global generator of pure expansion effects, in terms of which to deepen the differential aspects of preference symmetries, fundamental identities and...

In response to the recession, many European Countries, Italy included, are undertaking large spending cuts and tax hikes. This paper investigates whether the changes in the composition of public spending would hurt the long-run economic growth. If the composition of spending is strongly tilted...

Building on a class of transcendental preferences for luxury, explicit solutions for price taking behavior and exchange equilibrium are discussed, which share the analytical tractability of Cobb-Douglas models and display positive relevance, along the lines discussed by Freixas and Mas-Colell...

A 2-parameter class of ordinal utility functions over a pair of goods is discussed with respect to general traits of preferences for luxury. The class contains Cobb-Douglas functions as no-luxury limit; its analytical tractability is probed by simple closed form solutions for Marshallian demand...

The present paper builds on Arrighetti e Curatolo, 2009, 2010 by introducing heterogeneous opportunists into an agent-based simulated world populated by heterogeneous loyal agents playing a repeated coordination game. On average, opportunistic exploitation of economic resources lowers...

This work makes a joint analysis of prevention and saving decisions. First we determine the optimal levels of the two variables and we analyze substitution between them. Second we provide some comparative statics results in order to determine the effects on optimal saving and prevention of...

This work is based on the hypothesis that explanation of collective action between firms requires partly different variables from that used in explaining collective action between individuals. In order to look at the problem of what determines collective action, a model has been built using...