In the trade policy debate, the complete liberalisation of world trade for agricultural products is one of the most relevant issues. European Union is a free trade area where agricultural products are protected and supported from the world market forces, more than any other good or service. The...

Have Italian mutual funds been able to generate “extra-return”? Were some of them able to persistently beat the competitors? In this paper we address these questions and provide a detailed and systematic performance and return persistence analysis of the Italian equity mutual funds. We show...

We propose a simultaneous equation system with GARCH errors to model the contemporaneous relations among Asian and American stock markets. On the estimated residuals, we evaluate the correlation matrix over rolling windows and introduce a correlation matrix distance, which allows both a...

This paper examines the role of the direct mechanisms in common agency games. We show how the introduction of a separability condition on the preferences of the agent is sufficient for a version of the Revelation Principle to hold in finite generic games. The result goes through without imposing...

This commentary critically reviews a recent paper by Baraldi (2004). It shows that results obtained there are not robust, and may mot hold after the introduction of minor changes in the model structure. It is claimed that this is not a technical point, but relates to the fundamental nature of...

The paper presents a multiple criteria model for the evaluation of the sustainability of projects for the economic re-use of historical buildings in Venice. The model utilises the relevant parameters for the appraisal of sustainability, aggregated into three macroindicators: intrinsic...

This paper examines the pressures of commoditization will continue to exert itself on companies and managers everywhere: the increasing impact of demographic change; the requirement to maintain a keen eye on costs in order to compete effectively within the global market; the continued advance of...

This essay aims to analyze the economic and social role of foreign (forestieri) merchants and artisans in Venice between the low middle age and the early modern time. In search of new perspectives of work, many strangers, also of different religions, came in Venice, where they organize...

We develop a model of friendship formation that sheds light on segregation patterns observed in social and economic networks. Individuals come in different types and have type-dependent benefits from friendships; we examine the properties of a steady-state equilibrium of a matching process of...

It is often argued that, first, the decision criterion of antitrust authorities should be total social welfare and that, second, mergers increasing the value of this criterion but ending with lower consumer surplus should be allowed in the name of efficiency gains realized by merging firms. This...