The main purpose of this study is to determine whether public capital contributes to productivity growth and, if so, what kind of public capital contributes most. We analyze a dataset of 46 prefectures in Japan over 41 years, from 1955 to 1995, and estimate the production function as the...

This paper provides a contribution to the debate on the role of EU cohesion policy in Italy. The focus is on the territorial effects of EU spending from 1996 to 2007. The empirical analysis considers a neoclassical growth model which is augmented by the structural funds spent by each region....

The establishment of the currently negotiated Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between EU and Ukraine is the next significant step towards Ukraine's deeper integration into the world economy, widely expected to result in additional welfare gains. As developing countries face some costs associated with...

This paper studies the implications of changes in the fiscal (spending-tax) policy mix when all categories of spending and taxes are according to their functional breakdown. In so doing, we build a general equilibrium OLG model which naturally incorporates the main functional categories of...

We argue a holdout is not a destructive investor behaviour but a rational investment decision. This investment decision is characterised by the mean-variance approach. We investigate intercreditor conflict by diverse portfolio structure. We demonstrate that at some point during the Greek (2012)...

We ask whether the birthplaces of Italian members of Parliament are favoured in the allocation of central government transfers. Using a panel of municipalities for the years between 1994 and 2006, we find that municipal governments of legislators’ birth towns receive larger transfers per...

This paper integrates into public economics a biologically founded, stochastic process of individual ageing. The novel approach enables us to investigate the interaction between health and retirement policy in order to quantitatively characterize the optimal joint design of the social insurance...

Crime risk perception is known to be an important determinant of individuals? well being. Therefore, it is crucial, especially for governments, to understand its determinants and those (public) policies that can reduce it. Among those polices, resources devoted to police forces emerge as a key...

The paper analyses how context and time dependent factors determine the impulse of R&D subsidies on firm behavior with respect to private R&D expenditures. Based on data from the German R&D survey, we combine propensity-score matching with a difference-in-difference-estimator in order to measure...