Foreign aid has been on a downward trend since at least the early eighties. Despite the commitments of donor governments, the GDP share of foreign aid for DAC countries has fallen to slightly more than 0,2% in the early part of this decade. The purpose of this paper is to explore the macro...

We study, both theoretically and empirically, how export intensity (the ratio of exports to sales) is related to firm productivity. Using a representative sample of Italian manufacturing firms, we find that Total Factor Productivity (TFP) is strongly negatively correlated with export intensity...

I analyze empirically the effects of both urban and industrial agglomeration on men’s and women’s search behavior and on the efficiency of matching. The analysis is based on the Italian Labor Force Survey micro-data, which covers 520 randomly drawn Local Labor Market Areas (66 per cent of...

The Grossman and Helpman (1994) model explains tariffs as the outcome of a lobbying game between special interests and the government. Most empirical implementations of this framework use instead non-tariff barriers to measure the extent of protection. Importantly, while the former set of...

This paper uses micro data from the Indonesian Census of Manufacturing to analyze the causal relationship between foreign ownership and plant productivity. To control for the possible endogeneity of the FDI decision, a difference-in-differences approach is combined with propensity score...

During the nineties, Europe became a major recipient of FDIs but Italian regions have been largely excluded from this process. Was it due to their characteristics, or were Italian regions ‘doomed’ by a negative country effect? In this paper we address this issue by estimating the...

Prolonged use of Fund resources has consistently expanded since the 1970s among both lowincome and middle-income countries. Overall this phenomenon suggests a lack of effectiveness of Fund supported programs. Such conditionality failure has been explained by the literature by looking both at the...

This paper examines the role of male-dominated international migration in shaping labor market outcomes by gender in migrant-sending households in Albania. Using detailed information on family migration experience from the latest Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) survey, we find that...

Growing inflows of FDI and the increasing integration Central Eastern European Countries’ firms in International Production Networks set by EU-15 principals have brought to a rise in trade in parts and components. As a consequence, new patterns of localisation of industrial activities in CEECs...

The main objective of the paper is to establish the link between the exogenous migration shocks and endogenous foreign direct investment flows in a small open economy setting with international capital mobility, immobile labour and a non-traded good. I find that the immigration of the...