Understanding how public investment affects economic performance in highly indebted low-income countries is crucial in order to implement effective fiscal policies for adjustment with growth. In this paper we provide an empirical analysis to investigate the relationship between public...

The aim of this paper is to explore the role of the institutional determinants of international comparative advantage. Starting from a theoretically well-founded general-equilibrium framework, where specialization depends on relative factor endowments and technological differences, we study the...

This paper empirically explores the connection between two recent phenomena in the European scenario: the dramatic upsurge of non-tariff trade measures and the remarkable rise in the role of European business lobbies. While these two facts have been widely recognized by the international trade...

Our theory of cultural-institutional persistence and innovation is based on uncoordinated updating of individual social norms and contracts, so that both culture and institutions are endogenous. We explain why Pareto-dominated cultural-institutional configurations may persist over long periods...

In the OECD countries, there exists a negative cross-country correlation between an economy's degree of employment protection and its degree of corporate ownership dispersion. One explanation is that employees' political rights influence corporate governance: systems characterized by strong...

Persistent inconsistency between predictions of standard theoretical models and empirical evidence of international trade dynamics suggests that the traditional understanding of the determinants of actual international trade patterns is incomplete. What is missing? A recent literature suggests...

This paper develops a NATREX (NATural Real EXchange rate) model for two large economies, the Eurozone and the United States. The NATREX approach has already been adopted to explain the medium-long term dynamics of the real exchange rate in a number of industrial countries. So far, however, it...

This paper explores the way the man?nature relationship and the related environmental problems have been dealt along with the history of the economic thought. We discuss a number of different theoretical frameworks (classical, Marxian and neoclassical economics, Georgescu-Roegen's approach and...

This paper develops a NATREX (NATural Real EXchange rate) model for two large economies, the Eurozone and the United States, which are fully specified and allowed to interact. The theoretical framework, grounded on dynamic disequilibrium modelling approach in continuous time, provides the basis...