This paper studies whether civic capital acts an effective restraint against opportunistic behavior in transactions, looking at the degree of outsourcing to external suppliers of service provision in Italian firms. Our results show that, on average, firms tend to outsource more services where...

In a two sectors, two regions economy I show that the higher increasing returns to scale of an industry, the easier it will concentrate in response to natural advantage. To this end, one sector is assumed to be perfectly competitive and the other is monopolistically competitive, with a region's...

Using several data sources, we assess the impact of Italy's outward foreign direct investment (FDI) on local employment growth between 1996 and 2001 for 12 manufacturing industries and 103 administrative provinces. Our main result is that, controlling for the local industrial structure and area...

It is well established in the literature that foreign affiliates are subject to a series of governance and assimilation costs that deteriorate their performance. This is particularly relevant for firms which have been recently acquired by foreign investors. We employ the variation in civic...

Using data on Italian cities, we document that, over the period 2001-2011, the number of establishments and employment in some key service industries are positively related to the inflow of tourists. We then build a general equilibrium model of small open cities to study the impact of tourism on...