Ageing society opens up enormous economic potential. Whereas for a long time social interpretation homed in on the doomsday scenarios of demographic change, it is the economic potential that is now emerging with increasing clarity. Information and communication technologies stand a good chance...

On March 18th 2009, FED has made a move it haven’t done since 1960 (the so-called Operation Trust conceived by the Kennedy administration): it steped into the market in order to buy long term securities for an amount of some 1.25 trillion dollars. FED also announced a program to restart...

In the specialized literature it is reviewed the taxation from all points of view and the question raised by the last decade analysts is: what is the optimum level of taxation? The difficulty in answering to this question stands in the opposite interests : state wants a high level of taxation...

Patent enforcement in developing countries generates considerable controversy, especially when patents involve potentially life-saving drugs. This paper argues that common concerns regarding the effects of patents on prices and on research incentives of pharmaceutical multinationals are...

We measure willingness to pay for privacy in a field experiment. Participants were given the choice to buy a maximum of one DVD from one of two online stores. One store consistently required more sensitive personal data than the other, but otherwise the stores were identical. In one treatment,...

Why do some individuals pirate digital music while others pay for it? Using data on a sample of undergraduate students, we study the determinants of music piracy by looking at whether a respondent’s last song was obtained illegally or not. In doing so, we incorporate (i) the...

We examine linkages between aggregate household income, distribution of that income, and aggregate cross-country expenditure patterns. We are able to decompose income effects into international income dispersion effects (from variations in average income) and national income dispersion (income...

We use detailed data on housing prices in Italy available for a large number of years and with a fine geographical breakdown to compute capital gains and losses on the most widespread asset among consumers, housing, and inquire whether changes in housing values affect consumption. We find that...

Regulation and contract enforcement may be important determinants of the development of the household loan market, as much as they are of the supply of corporate loans on which the literature has focused. This paper draws on the Italian experience to provide evidence that formal and informal...

This paper considers alternative interpretations of the Normal Cost Hypothesis of industrial pricing behaviour. It shows first that the hypothesis can interpreted as implying that actual unit costs are an endogenous variable, for which some measures of normal unit costs are an appropriate...