Italy makes for a very interesting case study of the impact of social variables on economic performance. Across its … the importance of some social variables on industrialization and on employment creation across 95 Italian provinces during … industrial and economic development. On the other hand we find strong evidence that organized crime, measured as high murder …

We investigate the effects of civic norms and associational networks on crime rates. Civic norms may attach guilt and … variables, measurement error and spatial correlation. Italy's great variance in social and economic characteristics, its … minimise the first two problems. To tackle the last two ones, we use report-rate adjusted crime rates and estimate a spatial …

The paper estimates a conditional ß-convergence model of labor productivity growth in Italy's manufacturing industry … explain much of the geographical variability of productivity growth in manufacturing in nineteenth-century Italy …