Our theory of cultural-institutional persistence and innovation is based on uncoordinated updating of individual social norms and contracts, so that both culture and institutions are endogenous. We explain why Pareto-dominated cultural-institutional configurations may persist over long periods...

With the new European fiscal compact, fiscal rules of budget balance over the cycle have been introduced to limit the growth of the debt ratio to GDP. The objection may arise that they would have an adverse effect, especially in the long run on employment and growth. We test the proposition...

The role of households in the non market production and the importance of the household production has come topical in the last few years as a result of studies on the measurement of economic well-being of society. Non-market household production covers the goods and services household members...

This paper studies the role played by ICT in affecting the efficiency of business services (BS) industry, using a structural disequilibrium model of the Italian economy. The Italian BS sector presents a peculiar dynamics (compared to other EU countries) in that, after initially improving its...

In this paper we present a dynamic small open economy version of the standard neoclassical model of exogenous growth where we allow for international migration. We consider both the case of perfect world capital markets and the case of imperfect capital markets and show that local indeterminacy...

Two labor market targeted …scal policies, a hiring subsidy and a wage subsidy for new hires of labor, are evaluated, and their macroeconomic e¤ects compared with those of standard …scal instruments. The analyses are based on an extension of a monetary, open economy, search and...

The Italian university system has long been characterized by high non-completion rates, though aggregate data show a slight reduction of dropouts in recent years. The most straightforward theoretical explanation for this lies in the lowering opportunity cost of studying due to the financial and...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the roots of the slowdown in the Italian total factor productivity (TFP). The analysis focusses on the specific pattern of technical progress in determining the dynamics of the TFP. This analysis can not be done with Cobb—Douglas technology but...

La forte ondata migratoria, che ha interessato molte economie dell’Europa occidentale a partire dalla fine del secolo scorso, ha posto numerosi paesi di destinazione, fino ad allora caratterizzati da tassi positivi di emigrazione, di fronte a nuove sfide per l’integrazione degli immigrati....

In this paper, we build on the insights of the Trade Restrictiveness Index (TRI) approach by computing uniform tariff equivalents for the European Union primary sector using the Global Trade Analysis Project model and its associated data base. The main contribution of the paper is to extend and...