The essay is aimed at clarifying whether and on which conditions Digital Rights Management systems can be useful for fostering the development of the broadband market. The starting point of the study is that content providers seem reluctant to use broadband to distribute their contents, because...

The Google Books Search initiative, and the possible anticompetitive effects implied by the approval of the Settlement Agreement (SA) are worldwide debated issues. The scarce and embryonic literature on the topic, as well as the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, adopted a...

The main purpose of this paper is to discuss the results of a regional economic impactanalysis aimed at quantifying the local macroeconomic effects (on employment and income)generated by the veterinary epidemiology centre «Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentaledell'Abruzzo e del Molise "G....

The neoclassical economic theory and the agglomeration economies literature completely overlook the importance of environmental and sustainability issues, so they cannot answer to the question whether economic sustained growth and environmental sustainability can be combined. In order to gain...

The evolution of the Italian airport sector needs a clear-cut discontinuity from the past,without which it is unlikely that the objective of seizing the socio-economic opportunitiesrelated to the expected increase in air traffic for the coming years will be achieved. A moresystemic vision of the...

The paper aims at proposing a sectoral «shift and share» analysis of the labour productivity growth of the Italian Regions through a decomposition in two different components: an intra-sectoral one, which relates to productivity gains achieved thanks to the internal improvements of...

This paper provides an empirical investigation of the effects of public funding of academic research on external funding obtained via research contracts, consultancies and «research to order» activities more generally. These informal collaborations between university departments and business...