In this paper, we study how the birth of the first universities in Italy affected the emergence of the Italian free cities-states (the commune) in the period 1000-1300 a.d. Exploiting a panel dataset of 121 cities, we show that after the foundation of a new university the distance between each...

The aim of this paper is to explore the role of 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...

Most pre-crisis explanations of the various corporate governance systems have considered the separation between ownership and control to be an advantage of the Anglo-American economies. They have also attributed the failure of other countries to achieve these efficient arrangements to their...

Cultural and institutional differences among nations may result in differences in the ratios of marginal costs of goods in autarchy and thus be the basis of specialization and comparative advantage, as long as these differences are not eliminated by trade. We provide an evolutionary model of...

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. After description of the theoretical framework grounding on dynamic disequilibrium modelling approach in continuous...

We study the persistence of the gender unemployment gap in the Italian regions in the 1992-2009 period. Results from unit-root tests analysis with structural break suggest that the process of gender catching-up in the unemployment rates is occurring in most of the regions but at different pace....

Most pre-crisis explanations of the various corporate governance systems have considered the separation between ownership and control to be an advantage of the Anglo-American economies. They have also attributed the failure of other countries to achieve these efficient arrangements to their...