le grandi tappe storiche dell'integrazione europea; i Trattati di Amsterdam e di Nizza; l'allargamento ad est; i criteri di Copenaghen; i negoziati di adesione.

The paper analyzes the relationship between trade, financial integration and business cycle synchronization in the euro area. The introduction of the euro has had a noticeable impact on European financial markets: we find evidence that capital markets integration exerts a positive effect on...

Do good looks make people more productive? An impact of looks on earnings has been found in the empirical literature: plain people earn less than average-looking people who earn less than the good-looking. However, an important question remains unanswered: is the impact of beauty due to pure...

The labour productivity impact of innovation is investigated in this paper combining neo-Schumpeterian insights on the variety of innovation, with the importance of industrial structures and firm size; two models are proposed for explaining productivity and export success in European...

We characterize the optimal investment decision and the stock value of an unlevered firm that holds the non-standard option of improving the growth rate of cashflows from its assets in place upon incurring an irreversible cost. The firm's investment policy and equity price are studied as a...

The Finance-Growth Nexus is a classical source of debate among economists. This contribution offers regional evidence on this issue in order to see if it can meet the data within a 140 years old economic union - Italy -, in the ideal context for its main competitor - New Economic Geography - and...

The paper designs an optimal payment system for a group of producers implementing it empirically. It shows how to implement the first best through higher prices for better quality commodities, deriving the optimal pricing schedule. It also takes into account producers' heterogeneity by modelling...

This work explores some distributional properties of aggregate output growth-rate time series. We show that, in the majority of OECD countries, output growth-rate distributions are well-approximated by symmetric exponential-power densities with tails much fatter than those of a Gaussian. Fat...