This paper considers the impact of the Constitutional Court on legislative output in Italy.Following Tsebelis' (2002) veto players model and the stylised facts as regards the Italian Constitutional Court's activity, this paper presents a multi-stage game in the spirit of Gely and Spiller (1990)....

We consider a set-up where two governments have either conflicting or matching preferences on the provision of differentiated (local) goods supplied by a common monopoly bureau. We develop a two-stage game. At stage-1, the two governments decide whether or not to merge into a single institution....

Abstract: This paper presents the results of two experiments designed to test violations of Subjective Expected Utility Theory (SEUT) within a sample of Italian trade union delegates and leaders. Subjects priced risky and ambiguous prospects in the domain of gains. Risky prospects were based on...

We introduce ambiguity (Knightian uncertainty) into a stripped-down version of Alesina's (1987) partisan model of the business cycle. We show that, if the private sector's subjective expectations of future events are ambiguous, there is the possibility of a political business cycle, even when...

We derive the sub-game perfect Nash equilibria for the foreign direct investment (FDI) game played between two unionised firms. Among other results, we show that FDI is less likely, ceteris paribus, the greater is union bargaining power, the stronger the weight the union attaches to wages, and...

We derive the sub-game perfect Nash equilibria for the foreign direct investment (FDI) game played between two unionized firms. We show that FDI is less likely, ceteris paribus, the greater is union bargaining power and the more substitutable are the firms' products in the potential host...

This paper focuses on the effects of product market integration on wage-bargaining institutions in a one-way trade model of an international Cournot oligopoly. It shows that product market integration (i.e. a reduction in trade costs either from an arbitrary or from its optimal level) lowers the...

This paper analyzes the efficacy and desirability of decentralized fiscal policies, in a two-region federal economy, with monopolistic competition in local product markets, unionized local labor markets, and a nationwide competitive sector. Local governments are utilitarian and use...

This paper considers the effects of fiscal policy in a two-sector small open economy, with unionized labour markets, and heterogeneous types of imperfect competition in the product markets. By making the marginal propensity to import endogenous, the paper shows that there is no robust or general...