We study the relationship between gerontocracy and aggregate economic performance in a simple model where growth is driven by human capital accumulation and productive government spending (investments in ICT). We show that gerontocratic élites display the tendency to underinvest in public...

The aim of this paper is to study the labor demand in the Italian manufacturing, using firm-level data on pharmaceutical industry. The Italian pharmaceutical industry is characterized by the existence of long-term labor contracts, and this fact suggests to consider labor as quasi-fixed input. In...

The aim of this article is to analyze the relationship between drug price and drug quality and how it varies across two of the most common regulatory regimes in the pharmaceutical market: Minimum Efficacy Standards (MES) and Price Controls (PC). We develop a model of adverse selection where a...

The analysis of overdispersed counts has been the focus of a large amount of literature, with the general objective of providing reliable parameter estimates in the presence of heterogeneity or dependence among subjects. In this paper we extend the standard variance component models to the...

The paper tests predictions of a traditional intra-household bargaining model which, under reasonable assumptions, shows that lack of bargaining power in the value chain significantly reduces the capacity of obtaining benefits from increased product demand arising from trade liberalization and...

The empirical literature tries to identify credit rationing and its determinants by using balance sheet data or evidence from corporate surveys. Observational equivalence, identification problems, and interview biases are serious problems in these studies. We analyse the determinants of credit...

The paper analyzes the relationship between stock prices and fundamentals for a large sample of US stocks in the last ten years using a random coefficient model. Heterogeneity and omitted variable bias are properly taken into account with model coefficients being allowed to vary across time and...

The New Proposal of Basel Committee on banking regulation issued in January 2001 allows banks to use Internal Rating Systems to classify firms. Within this context, the main problem is to find a model that fits data as better as possible, providing at the same time good prediction and...