This study examines the development of rural tourism in Italy, highlighting the wide range of activities undertaken on rural tourism farms. Currently, rural tourism is presented as an enterprise parallel to traditional farming activities that generates additional income and fosters greater...

In the face of past ambiguous results on growth effects of education when measured through school attainment, some papers suggest that some countries may be unable to use productively their schooling output because of the scope of cronyism. We dig deeper and demonstrate that, in a stylized...

In this paper we analyse the determination of cost efficiency in a sample of Italian small banks located in different geographical areas and including two great institutional categories: cooperative banks (CB’s) and other banks. We highlight the effect of environmental factors (asset quality,...

In this paper we analyze the impact of the current financial crisis on the determination of technical efficiency in a sample of Italian small banks, highlighting the interaction of the crisis with different regulatory regimes existing for cooperative banks (CB’s) and other banks. We find that...

The rationale for fiscal rules and institutions has been explained by the existence of deficit and spending biases that arise due to political fragmentation within government or between governments that alternate in office. In common pool models fiscal outcomes are determined by the...