The paper develops an agent-based coordination game in which agents seek, try out and maintain coordination in the presence of positive search and coordination costs. Agents are perfectly rational in the sense that they optimise their individual payoff through coordination. They are moreover...

In this paper we attempt to estimate labour supply elasticities for four categories of Italian workers: married men, married women, unmarried men, unmarried women. We use microdata provided by the Bank of Italy 2002 survey adopting a piecewise linear labour supply functional form. Sample...

Local public good provision from different government levels is subject to many bias coming from the political process; incentives indeed, vary with the size of the beneficiaries’ set and costs may affect the results of political competition by reducing total resources available for...

We employ input-output tables to study the relation between off-shoring and productivity growth in the Italian manufacturing industries in 1995-2003. Our results indicate that not all types of off-shoring are positively related to productivity growth. In particular, the international outsourcing...

Is the rapid growth of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) activities shaping new local specialization and industrial concentration? Does the analysis of local economic conditions help to explain the formation of “places” specialized in ICT? We use 2001 Census data by Local...

We collect data from three Italian microcredit institutions which operate in urban areas by granting individual loans to two categories of wealthless borrowers: single entrepreneurs and organizations (cooperatives and associations).Evidence shows that organizations repay with higher probability...

This paper investigates empirically the role of real assets in credit rationing. The analysis is based on the idea that asset tangibility is inversely related to the probability that a firm will be credit constrained. Indeed, when loans are collateralized, the amount borrowed is determined by...

In order to examine the role of non-economically measurable factors into the models of voluntary provision of public goods, Experimental Economics showed two systematic findings: (a) in early rounds of game, individual contributions are surprisingly high and increasing, but they tend to decrease...

The issue of the cooperation among private agents in realising collective goods has always raised problems concerning the basic nature of individual behaviour as well as the more traditional economic problems. The Computational Economics literature on public goods provision can be useful to...