Gambling represents a channel through which some relevant aspects of our social life, such as audacity, competition and risk, manifest themselves. Gambling is both a pleasing diversion and a way of socialisation, where gratification and problematic issues alternate. Most gamblers are social...

We study the relationship between suicide rates and socioeconomic factors by using a panel data at Italian province level in the time span 1996-2005. Our analysis focuses on the impact of social norms on suicidal behaviours. In particular, beyond the usual social correlates of suicide rates, we...

What factors drive the length of a kidnapping experience? A theoretical model is developed to conduct comparative statics. A unique data set covering all kidnappings for ransom in Sardinia between 1960 and 2010 is analyzed. Factors related to the ability to pay and cost of abduction matter. The...

Empirical evidence of the marginal deterrent effect is provided. Exploring a data set of kidnapping crimes in Sardinia between 1960 and 2012 changes in Italian policy regarding sanctions for kidnapping and their associated impact on murders is considered. Deaths associated with kidnappings...

This paper studies the impact of a set of managerial features on performance in the top division of the Italian football league during seasons 2000/01-2009/10. Our set of coach characteristics includes indicators of skill, experience, innate features as well as empathy with the team. We find...

We investigate the comparative technical efficiency of producer cooperatives (PCs) and conventional firms (CFs) by looking at the performance of a mixed sample of Sardinian wine producing companies over the period 2004-2009. Thanks to the similarity of the habitats in which the firms operate,...

In the last decades, the interest in the relationship between crime and business cycle has widely increased. It is a diffused opinion that a causal relationship goes from economic variables to criminal activities. This work aims to verify this proposition by using the dynamic factor model to...

This paper analyses how a set of economic variables and a deterrence variable affect criminal activity. Furthermore, it highlights the extent to which crime is detrimental for the economic activity. The case study is Italy for the time span 1970 up to 2004. An Autoregressive Distributed Lags...

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that, for the case of Italy, ceteris paribus, tourist areas tend to have a greater amount of crime than non-tourist ones in the short and long run. Following the literature of the economics of crime à la Becker (Crime and Punishment - An Economic...

Criminal activity performs like a tax on the entire economy - it discourages domestic and foreign direct investments, it reduces firms’ competitiveness, and reallocates resources creating uncertainty and inefficiency. Although the impact of economic variables on crime has been widely...