This paper empirically analyzes how political factors affect the deployment of renewable energy (RE) sources and compares it to other economic, energy and environmental drivers that have received greater attention in the literature so far. The sample encompasses the EU countries bound to attain...

Expert contributors in economics and political science offer a comprehensive breakdown of the issue of local jurisdiction fragmentation and provide recommendations for successful policy reform. Topics discussed include economies of scale, the costs and benefits of voluntary and forced...

This paper tests the explanatory power of alternative theories on the determinants of judiciary independence using annual and decision-based data on the Italian Constitutional Court. The estimates show that structural measures of judiciary independence, such as the share of constitutional judges...

This paper has two goals. 1) To evaluate the sustainability of Italian public deficits according to the methodology developed by Trehan and Walsh (1988, 1991) and Bohn (2004); 2) To analyze how the determinants of debt creation evolved in the years following the Maastricht Treaty and how this...

Empirical tests of the theories on the relationship between political competition and economic performance generate a puzzle: data tend to support the theory at the lower levels of government, but not in panels of countries. We argue that the larger set of policy instruments reduces the tax...

We test the "war of attrition" models of fiscal performance on the sample of Italian governments from 1948 to 1994. We control for conditioning phenomena, like government stability, majority size, central bank independence, political budget cycle and external economic constraints, as well as for...

We investigate whether corporatist governance negatively affects growth: a) directly through higher transaction costs involved in the policy decision making process; b) indirectly, yielding growth retarding policy decisions. We construct a more accurate data set for 18 OECD countries in the...