This work builds upon some long-term secular regularities concerning the relation between consumption of energy, technological progress and economic growth and reassesses the old question raised around forty years ago in the "limits to growth" discussion (Meadows et al. [1972]), namely are the...

This book is about industrial policies seen as intrinsic fundamental ingredients of all development processes: witness to that, every experience of successful industrialization, ranging from Germany and the USA, almost two centuries ago, all the way to Korea, Taiwan, Brazil, China and India...

Vector Autoregressions (VARs) are a class of time series models commonly used in econometrics to study the dynamic effect of exogenous shocks to the economy. While the estimation of a VAR is straightforward, there is a problem of finding the transformation of the estimated model consistent with...

We consider a simple pure exchange economy with two assets, one riskless, yielding a constant return, and one risky, paying a stochastic dividend, and we assume trading to take place in discrete time inside an endogenous price formation setting. Traders demand for the risky asset is expressed as...

We test recent theory on the benefits of auctions and bargaining as alternative procurement mechanisms using data on the procurement of medical devices by Italian hospitals. Theory suggests that auctions perform well when cost control is the key concern, but are less effective at producing the...

Quantitative methods are employed to describe two fundamental processes in the creation of free (libre) and open source software (FLOSS) that are at work in the collaborative development environment of the SourceForge.Net platform: resource mobilization, and “entrepreneurial initiatives”...

This paper offers a sketch of what an economic theory of the firm would look like if it were founded on the thought of Joseph Schumpeter, particularly on Chapters 1-2 of his Theory of Economic Development. Schumpeterian analysis requires an intuitively appealing and realistic conceptualization...

How do trade activities affect firms' employment and wages structures? Using firm level data on Italian manufacturing firms, this paper adds to the existing literature, by assessing how the degree of involvement in international trade impacts on workforce composition, earning levels and wage...

In this study we use a survey data on 398 Finnish manufacturing firms for the years 2002 and 2005 to empirically explore whether and which organizational factors explain why certain firms produce larger innovative research output than others, and whether the incentives to innovate that certain...

This work presents experimental results on a coordination game in which agents must repeatedly choose between two sides, and a positive fixed payoff is assigned only to agents who pick the minoritarian side. The game presents a variety of asymmetric pure strategy equilibria, and a unique...