Obesity is a complex medical problem that according to World Health Organization has become a global epidemic. Its increasing prevalence in Argentina is leading to a greater incidence of associated diseases, with a significant impact on health costs and a decline in life quality. This problem is...

The recent history of Europe is characterized by a dual picture showing the Old and New countries in sharp contrast with respect to their industrial specialisation and economic performance. We aim at analyzing the intertwined performance of regions and industries in New and Old European...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether civilian disability pensions have been used as an antipoverty measure in Italy. We applied a classic panel analysis, followed by a two step GMM (Generalized Method of Moments) analysis in which we introduced the spatial variable, to Italian...

This paper employs provincial data to study the relationship between several crime typologies, namely murder, theft, robbery and fraud, and economic output in Italy. We employ a spatial econometric approach where the spatial proximity is defined by a measure of physical distance between...

This paper compares legislative dynamics under all procedures in which the Council of Ministers votes by qualified majority (QMV). We make five major points. First, the EU governments have sought to reduce the democratic deficit by increasing the powers of the European Parliament since 1987,...

Previous studies have proposed competing theories to explain European intergovernmental conference (IGC) outcomes, but they fail to test these theories against one another. I examine the literature on IGC bargaining and derive several testable hypotheses. Using data on member state preferences...

Employing data from Italian manufacturing firms, this paper attempts to check the existence of geographic and industry distance effects on the investment in information and communication technology (ICT). Geographic distance is defined by the Euclidean distance between each possible pair of...

This paper introduces the notion of nowcasting causality for mixed-frequency VARs as the mixed-frequency version of instantaneous causality. We analyze the relationship between nowcasting and Granger causality in the mixed-frequency VAR setting of Ghysels 2012 and illustrate that nowcasting...

The paper focuses on the importance of assumptions made about market structure and firm behavior in empirical trade policy analysis. The contribution to the relevant literature is 3-fold: first the paper develops two original models which incorporate imperfectly competitive market structures in...

The Davis-Hinich multidimensional model of electoral competition is the foundation for a very broad set of models in economics, political science, public choice and political economy. This essay reviews some of these models and how they build on and extend the original Davis-Hinich model. It...