The paper investigates the patterns of persistence of innovation and of the properties of firms' knowledge base (KB) across a sample of Italian firms in the period 1998-2006. The analysis draws upon a theoretical representation of knowledge as a collective good, stemming from the recombination...

In this paper, we present a methodology to represent and measure knowledge which takes into account knowledge heterogeneity and its sectoral level theoretical and empirical implications in knowledge intensive environments. We draw on work on recombinant knowledge, extending the approach to...

In this paper, we test and reject the separability of production and consumption decisions of agricultural households in Ethiopia, using data from a rural household survey conducted in 1994 and an estimated labour demand equation. We also elicit socio-demographic and asset variables that are...

A substantial literature has examined the determinants of support for democracy and although existing work has found a gender gap in democratic attitudes, there have been no attempts to explain it. In this paper we try to understand why females are less supportive of democracy than males in a...

This paper solves a second-best problem where a government has in particular to choose whether to tax financial inflows (capital controls) or not, and when. A multi-stage optimal control technique is used to this end. First, it is shown that it is optimal to switch in finite time from capital...

A l'égard des théories de la justice, le droit et l'économie semblent évoluer de manière divergente : alors que la recherche de ce qui est " juste " n'appartient plus à l'argumentation du juriste, ni à la finalité du droit, l'économiste s'est réapproprié l'examen des questions de...

Par leur méthode d'approche de la justice sociale, Rawls, Hayek et Sen occupent chacun le sommet d'un triangle, où le " comparatisme " du dernier tient désormais à équidistance le " contractualisme " du premier et " l'évolutionnisme " du second (1). Lorsque la position du philosophe sert...

This paper discusses the problem of optimal design of a jurisdiction structure from the view point of a welfarist social planner when households with identical utility functions for non-rival public good and private consumption have private information about their contributive capacities. It...

We develop a reliable Bayesian inference for the RIF-regression model of Firpo, Fortin and Lemieux (Econometrica, 2009) in which we first estimate the log wage distribution by a mixture of normal densities. This approach is pursued so as to provide better estimates in the upper tail of the wage...