The employment protection legislation is not enforced uniformly both across and within countries. Among the others, the enforcement of regulation depends on the courts' actions and on the capacity of firms to escape legislation. We exploit the variation in courts' inefficiency across Italian...

We study the regime of multiple note issuers that characterized the Italian monetary system from the unification of Italy in 1861 to the creation of the Bank of Italy in 1893. We describe how the system evolved and we analyze how it functioned by studying the clearing of notes among banks. Since...

One of the effects of the introduction of fair trade goods is that of triggering socially responsible imitation of profit maximising sellers and distributors, thereby creating a consumer driven market mechanism which promotes equity and inclusion. To proof ourclaim we analyze the effects of a...

Concerned consumers in the US and Europe are increasingly willing to pay an "ethical premium" for the social and environmental value of fair trade (FT) products. One of the fair trade criteria (aimed to enhance wellbeing and capacity building of marginalised producers) relates to producers’...

The aim of the paper is to study empirically the rent dissipation hypothesis in the case of Italy before the creation of the National Bank of Italy in 1893. The major bank of the state of Italy – the Banca Nazionale Sarda (BNS) – experienced over the period 1866-1893 a decrease in its...

The aim of the paper is to examine the hypothesis of rent dissipation in the case of the Italian banking system during the suspension of gold convertibility. The major bank of the new born state of Italy – the Banca Nazionale nel regno d’Italia – experienced over the period 1866-1881 a...

The study analyses the impact of Fair Trade (FT) and organic farming on a sample of FT rice producers in Thailand. It finds that per capita income from agriculture is positively and significantly affected by years of organic certification and FT affiliation. The estimated FT and organic...