Vulnerability to reduction of natural capital depends on defensive substitution possibilities that, in turn, are affected by the availability of other productive factors. However in several developing countries asset distribution tends to be highly skewed. Taking into account these elements,...

Emerging market economies have recently accumulated large stocks of foreign reserves. In this paper we address the question of what are the main factors accounting for reserve holdings in nine developing countries located in Asia and Latin America. Monthly data from January 1985 to May 2006 are...

This paper examines Adam Smith’s vision of family life and the role of the family in society as it stems from the Theory of Moral Sentiments. We first discuss textual evidences of Smith’s vision of gender differences and of the relationships between the sexes. Then we turn to TMS’s...

The paper’s main aim is to identify under which conditions the criterion of prior-independent optimality is applicable in the design of multidimensional franchise auctions. We first establish an impossibility result for second-score auctions by showing that in single-crossing environments...

In this paper, we reconstruct the process by which the decisions of a regulated local public utility, in terms of productive efficiency and quality of the service provided, impact on prices of final consumption goods, supplied in a oligopolistic market operating in the same geographic area. We...

Austrian economists do not directly face the problem of the relationships between economics and happiness. They even rather rarely use the word happiness and do not bother to define the philosophical meaning of it referring to Aristotle or to the Enlightenment. They prefer to speak of human...

Il criterio maggiormente usato in Italia dalle pubbliche amministrazioni per l’aggiudicazione di aste multdimensionali è il cosiddetto metodo aggregativocompensatore. Vengono qui studiati gli equilibri delle aste sotto questo criterio e l’analisi porta alla luce due problemi principali:...

The birth of new firms and their survival in the market are often seen as crucial for economic growth and competitiveness in a modern economy. This paper focuses on business demography of Italian firms, using an original dataset obtained by merging Capitalia-Reprint and AIDA, to identify the...

this paper aims at contributing to a better understanding of the determinants of aid effort by donor countries, a topic that has been rather under researched in the vast economic literature on development aid. We conduct an econometric analysis on panel data that refer to the 22 member countries...

This paper aims first of all to explore the social sustainability and the quality of economic growth in a sample of 50 Emerging and Transition Economies (ETEs), which are countries experiencing a process of fast growth and institutional change in most cases. Through a series of cross-country...