Do people "vote with their feet" due to a lack of political competition? We formalize the theory of political competition and migration to show that increasing political competition lowers political rent leading to net in-migration. Our empirical application using US data supports this...

The phenomenon of municipal capitalism, which characterizes many local governments in Italy and Europe has been subject to many studies, but none have tried to model what this could imply for the choice of the optimal regulatory rule, nor for the vertical allocation of regulatory tasks among the...

Starting from a few considerations on the phenomenon of municipal capitalism, a trait which characterizes many local governments in Italy and Europe, this paper presents a selective survey of some important topics in regulation. The most relevant contributions on privatization, political...

The paper discusses opportunities to utilize the series of micro-blogs as provided by the Twitter in observation of opinion dynamics. The spontaneity of tweets is more, as the service is attached more to the mobile communications. The extraction of information in the series of tweets is...

This study examines the violent crime convergence among the fifty one states in the United States. The chosen method for this analysis is nonlinear unit root test due to Kapetanios et al. (KSS, 2003), which was later extended by Chong et al. (CHLL, 2008). KSS-CHLL nonlinear unit root was applied...

The 1999-2006 versions of the Italian Domestic Stability Pact had many shortcomings and a modest impact with respect to the aim of aligning the fiscal behaviour of sub-national government units with the national commitments under the European Stability and Growth Pact. The Domestic Pact was...

Ecofin and Oecd methodology is used to reconstruct the historical evolution of public current health care expenditure for Italy and Lazio (an Italian Region). The reconstructed evolutions allow to detect what have been the per-capita expenditures per age brackets in absolute values (Euro) in...

The importance of the length of state history for understanding variations in income levels, growth rates, quality of institutions and income distributions across countries has received a lot of attention in the recent literature on long-run comparative development. The standard approach,...

The demographic database of Eurostat and of Us Census of Bureau are explored and the main facts are extracted and described. This paper is completely self-standing but is also part of a more general analysis dedicated to the functioning and sustainability of pay-as-you-go to finance the welfare...

This article, explore the origin of public choice compared with the traditional view of political science. The emphasize is on the methodology and the initial research program developed by Buchanan and Tullock.