Two essays compose the dissertation. The first essay entitled "Membership in Citizen Groups" (joint with Stefano Barbieri) addresses the coordination problem individuals face when deciding whether to pay a membership fee and join an association that provides a pure public good and selective...

This paper examines whether the export decision of firms is affected by their ownership structure, specifically it looks at whether family control is an obstacle to entering foreign markets. The underlying assumption is that family firms are risk averse. Risk aversion may be an obstacle to...

This is Bruegel’s third report on the internationalisation of European firms, and the first one that relies on new, internationally consistent data resulting from the seven-country survey undertaken within the framework of the EFIGE (European Firms in a Global Economy) project. In the first,...

Call centers' managers are interested in obtaining accurate forecasts of call arrivals because these are a key input in staffing and scheduling decisions. Therefore their ability to achieve an optimal balance between service quality and operating costs ultimately hinges on forecast accuracy. We...

The issue of greenhouse gas (GHG) stabilization stands on three critical open questions. Namely, what are the impacts deriving from different levels of climate change and their distribution. What are the levels at which GHG concentration should be stabilized in order to avoid unacceptable...

Since its first inception in the debate on the relationship between environment and growth in 1992, the Environmental Kuznets Curve has been subject to continuous and intense scrutiny. The literature can be roughly divided in two historical phases. Initially, after the seminal contributions,...