Recent literature on heterogeneous multi-product firms predicts that elimination of marginal (less productive) products, due to fiercer competition, leads to an increase of firm efficiency. We test this prediction in the case of a sample of Italian firms during a period (2000-05) of rising...

A recent literature questions the mainstream omniscient rational agent, suggesting that agents act as, and have the same bounded rationality of, econometricians. Heterogeneous expectations may then arise because of the different forecasting models used by individuals, who select disparate...

Financing pension systems necessitates that actual output is redistributed from workers and entrepreneurs actually in activity in favour of retirees. Therefore, in a closed economy, the return on accrued pension funds, to be distributed to pensioners, is ceiled by the real growth of income,...

This study uses data on regional tax incentives for business investments in Italy to ask: How much additional investment was stimulated by the government intervention? Or does public financing displace private financing? To what extent would the outcomes on firm performance not have been...

During the first half of the current decade, with rising competitive pressures, Italian manufacturing firms were forced to undertake a process of restructuring which had positive repercussions on export performance. This paper carries out empirical analysis using a panel of exporting firms...

Virtually all governments seek to fight tax evasion exploiting better and better technological devices. Despite of that the phenomenon still remains alive and kicking all around the world. The foregoing naturally arises the question in the title. This paper develops a simple model to provide...

The “return to education” issue has been widely investigated in the economic literature. However, how the social value of education can affect its economic return and individual decisions on “human capital” investments has been somewhat neglected. The paper criticises the traditional...

The Italian unemployment compensation system is highly fragmented: there are a number of specific unemployment insurance schemes with very different criteria for entitlement, duration and replacement ratio of the benefits. Large segments of labour force are not covered, and the interaction with...

In this paper the Stochastic Frontier approach was used for the estimation and decomposition of manufacturing TFP growth in 14 EU member countries, drawing upon the EU-KLEMS database. This study identifies some key issues: in the period 1970-2005, the TFP rate of change in the EU manufacturing...

In recent years a number of studies have investigated stylised facts concerning the most important US macroeconomic time series(Stock and Watson, 2002; McConnell and Perez-Quiros, 2000; Blanchard and Simon, 2001; Arias, Hansen, and Ohanian, 2006); One of the main results of the analysis concerns a marked...