We investigate the effects of civic norms and associational networks on crime rates. Through their impact on trust and economic development, civic norms may raise the expected returns to crime, but they may also increase its opportunity cost and the feelings of guilt and shame attached to it....

This paper studies the determinants of the joint adoption of employment, wage and working time flexibility in workplaces, paying attention to the existence of complementarities. To better understand the role of country-specific institutional features, we compare the adoption of flexibility in...

The effect of military service on subsequent earnings has not been taken into account in the decennial debate on the abolition of military conscription in Western Europe. This paper provides evidence of the long-term effects of conscription on subsequent earnings. In our analysis, we use a...

The purpose of this paper is to develop a model that integrates inventory and labor decisions. We extend a model of inventory behavior to include a detailed specification of the role of labor input in the production process and of the costs associated with it. In particular, we distinguish...

Limits on information have deep economic impact and affect the conduct of economic policy. In the present paper we explore the effect of substantive uncertainty. A macro model is then derived in order to make this condition work at micro economic level too: the investment function implies an...

Recent evidence shows that the "home bias puzzle" in international trade may be associated with the mere presence of national borders (McCallum (1995)). In this paper we provide a theoretical framework to explain why borders may matter so much for trade. Our argument is that even between...

In economics, models, rather than theories, seem to be the fundamental units of appraisal and practitioners seem to hold in high esteem the criterion of ‘robustness’. In this paper we shall try to explicate the multifarious notion of robustness, and articulate it on three different...

In this paper we use individual micro data on workers combined with industry and regional data to study the dynamics of the wage differentials between skilled and unskilled workers in Italy in the period 1991-1996. Being different to previous empirical studies, our data allow us to explore in a...

This paper aims at exploring the nature and the determinants of the dynamic capabilities of the firm: a notion which, while increasingly more fashionable, remains still conceptually diffuse. Through a critical review of the massive and heterogeneous literature which refers, either explicitly or...

This paper aims at estimating early labour market returns (i.e. participation probability, employment probability and log hourly earnings) of Italian university graduates across college subjects. We devote great attention to endogenous selection issues using alternative methods to control for...