During the first half of the 1990s a pool of Italian judges carried out an investigation, named Mani Pulite (literally clean hands), that led many public officials to be prosecuted and convicted because of corruption. We show that Mani Pulite broke down the perverselinkage between corruption and...

I provide a discourse on the article by Prof. Lynn (2010), which suggests that differences in intelligence explain per capita income levels across the Italian regions. To emphasize that his article is affected by flaws leading to false conclusions. This is clear as soon as some basic principles...

This paper test the hypothesis that distance of firms from the main financial centre affects underpricing positively. Higher is the distance higher is the uncertainty about the true value of the listing firm and lower the issue price. Econometric results show that, in the Italian case, there is...

In this paper, we study how public and private expenditures in health and education affect economic growth by their influence on peoples health, abilities, skills and knowledge. We consider a growth accounting framework in order to test whether welfare expenditures more than offset the...

The impact on vertical contracting of a type-dependent reservation utility is investigated within a sequential monopolies environment with asymmetric information. The welfare and private properties of contracts controlling both the retail price and the sales level are compared with those...

We consider a simple economy where self interested taxpayers have incentives to evade taxes and to escape sanctions by bribing public officials in charge of tax collection. However, tax collectors may be monitored by second-level inspectors whose incentives to exert detection activity are...

The quality of the institutional environment is a crucial issue in understanding the effective outcome of fiscal decentralization initiatives. However, there has been so far very little work on the subject. In this paper we contribute to fill this gap by considering the municipalities belonging...