Is electoral competition good for political selection? To address this issue, we introduce a theoretical model in which ideological parties select candidates between party loyalists and experts, and allocate them into the electoral districts. Non-ideological voters, who care about national and...

We document the presence of a trade-off between unemployment benefits (UB) and employment protection legislation (EPL) in the provision of insurance against labour market risk. The mix of quantity restrictions and price regulations adopted by the various countries would seem to correspond to a...

Why do people have kids in developed societies? We propose an empirical test of two alternative theories - children as consumption" vs. investment" good. We use as a natural experiment the Italian pension reforms of the 90s that introduced a clear discontinuity in the treatment across workers....

Diverse theories of industry dynamics predict heterogeneity in production efficiency to be the driver of firms' growth, survival and industrial change, either through a direct link between efficiency and growth, or through an indirect effect via profitabilities, as more productive firms can...

This work explores a number of properties investigated in the empirical literature on firm size and growth dynamics: (i) the distribution and the autoregressive structure of firm size; (ii) the existence of size-growth scaling relationships; (iii) the distribution and the autoregressive structure...

This paper provides a description of the production process by comparing different frameworks in which to analyze the relations between inputs and output. The analyses are performed on a representative sample of Italian manufacturing firms. We employ both parametric and non-parametric analysis....

Are the observed spatial distributions of firms decided mostly by market-mediated, economy-wide locational forces, or rather by non-pecuniary, sector-specific ones? This work finds that the latter kind of forces weight systematically more than the former in deciding firm location. The analysis...

This paper jointly considers some pieces of evidence regarding peculiarities of industries' structure which are often separately addressed. Italian industrial sectors are known to be characterized by a high proportion of small enterprises that suffers from constraints to growth. We look at the...

This work explores the spatial distribution of productive activities in the Italian manufacturing industry. We propose an econometric model which tries to disentangle locationspecific from sectoral drivers in the dynamic process of spatial agglomeration. The basic idea is that the former...

Economies of agglomeration are central in understanding the emergence of industrial clustering. However, existing models that incorporate economies of agglomeration to explain industrial concentration have been providing a quite small set of empirically testable predictions. In this paper, we...