The essay reviews the different notions of returns to education ordinarily used in the economic policy debate and provides estimates of the quantitative importance of each. Investment in education is profitable both for individuals and for society even from the strictly economic standpoint; and...

The paper discusses the economic problem and the institutional features underlying the Nimby syndrome, and illustrates preliminary empirical evidence for Italy. It argues that siting procedures taking local preferences into account should be preferred when the heterogeneity in preferences across...

The paper attempts at disentangling the main sources of the rise in the Italian unemployment rate over the last four decades on the basis of a small model a la Layard-Nickell, identified and estimated using a structural VAR approach. Unemployment movements are assumed to be driven by fully...