The flexicurity approach claims a positive effect of flexible labour on firm performance, also through an increased ability to innovate. Critics consider it a deregulation of the labour market, decreasing investment in human capital and innovation. We contribute to this broad debate providing an...

Entry into licensed professions requires meeting competency requirements, typically assessed through licensing examinations. In the market for lawyers, there are large differences in the difficulty of the entry examination both across states and over time. The paper explores whether the number...

This paper addresses two important methodological issues in the analysis of industrial location: spatial dependence and nonlinearities. To this end, we estimate a semi-parametric spatial autoregressive negative binomial model using data on the number of inward greenfield FDI occurred over the...

Urban and Lambert (2005, 2008) present an exhaustive summary and an in-depth discussion of the literature contributions about the decomposition of the redistributive effect of a tax (RE). The authors discuss the indexes available in the literature for the potential vertical effect (V), the loss...

After a brief institutional history of the Italian NHS, I discuss the results in terms of efficiency and equity of about thirty years of a public health care system covering a wide range of services. Finally, I present the issues in the current policy debate and the liklely long-run impact of...

The paper aims at assessing the mechanics of the Great Recession, considering both its domestic propagation within the US, as well as its spillovers to advanced and emerging economies. A total of 50 countries has been investigated by means of a large-scale open economy macroeconometric model,...

We analyse the probability that an isolated system remain unchanged along time, finding its general expression showing that it can have discontinuities incompatible with the countable additivity principle.

We consider the problem of maximizing expected lifetime utility from consumption of a generalized geometric Brownian motion in the presence of controlling costs with a fixed component. Under general assumptions on the utility function and the intervention costs our main result is to show that,...

The amount of taxes and public expenditures seems to be uncorrelated to the level of market inequality in OECD countries. This empirical evidence is diffcult to be rationalized in a standard median voter theorem setting, where individuals rationally choose their preferred redistribution scheme....