We repeatedly elicited individuals? Willingness to Accept (WTA) evaluations for an auctioned bad in an experimental setting in which truthful revelation is the (weakly) dominant strategy. We investigate whether the observation of supposedly irrelevant signals (the market price, the asks at...

Exploiting three earthquakes in Italy as quasi-experiments, we analyze the response of homeowners’ consumption to transfers targeted to finance housing repair and reconstruction. To the extent that funds are made available up-front, these transfers are akin to loans, mainly affecting the...

In concurrence with the recent credit crisis, the Italian government tried to stimulate R&D expenditures through tax credit. We rely on this policy to identify the firm response to an exogenous countercyclical fiscal shock. Large heterogeneity by the size of cash is observed for firms in...

In this paper the principle of gratuitousness and its relationships with other principles which motivate behaviour, such as those inspired by reciprocity, is analyzed. The basic premise is that gratuitousness is a feature acquired by an action by virtue of the intentions that inspire the action...

This paper offers a new and robust model of the emergence and persistence of cooperation when interactions are anonymous, the population is well-mixed, and the evolutionary process selects strategies according to material payoffs. The model has a Prisoner’s Dilemma structure, but with an...

We provide international evidence on the relationship between the extent of underpricing related to initial public offerings (IPOs) and the distance of the issuing firm from the financial centre of a country: for France, Germany and Italy, the higher the distance, the higher the level of...

This study designs a laboratory experiment to investigate the link between personal responsibility and individual preferences for redistribution. We contribute to the literature by considering two key insights: first, effort is costly; second, its fruits can be grasped only in the future....

Since 1991 the Italian Legislator grants amnesties, protection and even economic bene.ts to former mobsters cooperating with the justice. These incentives were intro- duced to break down omertà. What is the economic logic behind this policy? Did the program succeed? To address these issues we...

In this paper we consider a simple economy where self interested taxpayers may have incentives to evade taxes and to escape sanctions, by bribing public officials in charge for tax collection. The level of monitoring and the level of corruption are endogenously determined assuming that the price...

This paper relies on sectoral-level data to interpret aggregate fluctuations of labor productivity and employment in US as due to exogenous disturbances. A shock determining permanent effect on the real investment good price may reasonably be interpreted as an investment-specific technology...