Extending a brand beyond its original product category is a major strategy for long-term profitability. A brand owner can internalize the development of the extension product, or license the brand to an external partner in order to exploit the licensee’s better capabilities and higher...

The aim of this paper is to study the empirical phenomenon of rating bubbles, i.e. clustering on extremely positive values in e-commerce platforms and rating web sites. By means of a field experiment that exogenously manipulates prior ratings for a hotel in an important Italian tourism...

The book brings together a series of research papers presented at a workshop on "Economic integration between the Mezzogiorno and the Centre North", held at the Bank of Italy in Rome on 15 March 2011. The workshop assessed the degree of economic integration between the two areas from several...

This paper identifies a new sufficient condition for a prudent agent to have positive precautionary saving in the presence of labor income and interest rate risks of any size. We also provide three economic interpretations for this condition focusing respectively on the marginal effect of saving...

After the Golden Age, Italy experienced increasing difficulties in adjusting its economy to the changing external context and to the requirements for sustaining catch-up growth at a higher level of economic development. The adjustment issue is common to advanced countries but the difficulties...

The present paper studies the provision of big and inefficient public investments in proprietary states. By means of these investments, whose rate of return is either nil or negative, an incumbent dictator can transfer resources to his/her supporters and obtain a head-start advantage in the...

After the Golden Age, Italy experienced increasing difficulties in adjusting its economy to the changing external context and to the requirements for sustaining catch-up growth at a higher level of economic development. The adjustment issue is common to advanced countries but the difficulties...