We study the effect of trade integration on the regional coevolution of income, migrations, and unemployment in a dynamic coreperiphery model with limited labor mobility and frictions in the job matching process. Our model can help explain a recently documented empirical puzzle, i.e., the...

Economic and commercial relations between the countries of the southern Mediterranean and the European Union (EU) have been profoundly affected by the recent ‘EU Initiative for the Mediterranean’ and conditioned by the creation of European Monetary Union (EMU). The paper discusses the costs,...

Why do we observe some LDCs objecting the prospect of a Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), although they have been keen to liberalize investment in preferential agreements in recent years? In this paper, we analyse the issue of MAI implementation and assess the welfare consequences of...

The pace of international skilled migration has accelerated during recent decades and it has attracted considerable attention across scholars and politicians. This paper gives a general and critical idea of the brain drain issue. It provides stylized facts on the magnitude and skill composition...

There is abundant evidence that immigrants’ networks are associated with larger trade flows between countries of origin and the country (or province) where they settle. The causality of such relation and its magnitude, however, have not been proven beyond reasonable doubt. We use the simple...

In this paper we provide empirical evidence on the effect of ICT investment on the propensity to offshore for a large sample of Italian manufacturing firms. Contrary to previous literature focussing on the service sector, after taking into account the endogeneity of ICT investment in the...

We focus on the role that the transmission of information between a multilateral (e.g., the IMF) and a country has for optimal (conditional) reform design. The main result is that the informational advantage of the country must be strictly greater than the advantage of the multilateral in order...

In an environment with correlated returns, this paper characterizes optimal lending contracts when the bank faces adverse selection and borrowers have limited liability. Group lending contracts are shown to be dominated by revelation mech- anisms which do not use the ex post observability of the...

This paper investigates the determinants of group membership, and in particular the effect of income inequality on individual incentives to join economic groups. Drawing on a simple model, we show that an increase in inequality has an ambiguous e¤ect and that the type of access rule (open...