Climate change policies and income inequality

This paper examines the dynamic impact of Climate Change Policies (CCPs) on income inequality, for a sample of 39 developed and developing countries, during the period 1990–2020. The results show that CCPs are associated with a significant and persistent increase in income inequality. The effect is robust across various measures of inequality and sensitivity tests, including an instrumental variable strategy. The effect of CCPs only materializes in the case of market-based CCPs, is stronger in countries characterized by a higher share of low-educated workers and initial level of inequality, while is mitigated in those with comprehensive redistribution policies, and during periods of fiscal expansions and stronger economic growth. These findings have important policy implications, as they emphasize the importance of the timing and design of CCPs, as well as the role of complementary policies

In Car Audio

This chapter presents implementations of advanced in Car Audio Applications. The system is composed by three main different applications regarding the In Car listening and communication experience. Starting from a high level description of the algorithms, several implementations on different levels of hardware abstraction are presented, along with empirical results on both the design process undergone and the performance results achieved

From revolution to elections. A comparative analysis of Tunisia and Egypt

Political participation is far from being a trivial issue. The focus of this paper will be on two dissimilar acts of political participation in the context of the Arab Spring: revolution and elections. In detail, I will first describe participants in revolution and elections - who they are and why they do participate - to then analyse the link (if any) between revolution and electoral participation. This study will develop a comparison between the cases of Tunisia and Egypt. The findings will illustrate that Tunisian insurgents are more likely to vote in post-revolution elections when compared to their Egyptian fellows, and that this is consistent with the events in the aftermath of the two revolutions

The determinants of FDI: a new network-based approach

This article investigates the determinants of FDI at sub-national level. It recognizes that MNEsModified Letter Turned Comma foreign activities are organized in networks of strongly interconnected, but geographically dispersed affiliates. This implies a different approach to the analysis of the determinants of FDI, which should focus on contextual factors able to stimulate economic relations at distance. Methodologically, we use a gravity-type model and different regression techniques with a new dataset on networks of FDI involving German and Italian regions. We find evidence that technologically proximate regions sharing the same industry profile are more likely to experience positive and large networks driven by MNEs, with weaker evidence related to cultural and institutional proximities, which cannot compensate the negative impact of geographic distance. The distinctive contribution of this paper is to emphasize that local policies to attract FDI are more likely to succeed if addressed to similar regions

Global networks, local specialisation and regional patterns of innovation

A large academic consensus exists on the idea that successful innovative processes are geographically bounded within regions. Nevertheless, the ability of regions to capture and re-use external knowledge is also regarded as a fundamental element to sustain and refine the local profile of specialisation and competitiveness. The present article combines these views to investigate the sources of the regional innovation process, by analysing data on Italian regions over the period 2007–2012. We define global networks based on all the local firms identifiable as global ultimate owners and their foreign subsidiaries. Our main results suggest that both the internal specialisation and the regional external linkages can generate indigenous innovation, but the role of the networks varies substantially according to its density, its degree of complementarity with the specialisation profile, its geographical spread and the specific location of the foreign subsidiaries. Our results, then, support a view of the regional innovation as an interactive process whereby valuable knowledge resources are not only generated within the reach of the local economy, but they are also integrated with external inputs. This contrasts with recent anti-globalisation views according to which the increase in the foreign operations of national companies impoverishes the local economy

Crises and energy markets reforms

The spikes in energy prices observed following recent major global shocks—e.g., COVID-19 and Russia-Ukraine war —as well as issues related to the diffusion of renewable energy power generation, have reopened the debate about the design of electricity markets and the role of the “state” vs. “market” in the electricity markets governance. In this article, we contribute to this debate by looking at the effect of economic crises on energy markets regulation. We find that, historically, economic crises have been associated with a persistent tightening in energy markets regulation (i.e., more restrictions to competition), with the effect being larger during periods of high economic and policy uncertainty and when governments were politically strong—that is, characterized by a larger majority, in majoritarian systems, and at the beginning of their mandate

It’s a matter of confidence. Institutions, government stability and economic outcomes

In this paper we analyse the effect of constitutional structures over policy outcomes. In particular, we exploit the heterogeneity in parliamentary systems deriving from the presence and the use of the confidence vote to investigate whether stable and unstable parliamentary systems behave differently in terms of the policies they implement. This finer partition of parliamentary systems allows us to identify effects that are more robust than the ones previously discussed in the literature. We show that the difference between presidential and parliamentary systems documented in previous works is driven by a difference between presidential and stable parliamentary systems. We suggest that possible transmission channels are legislative cohesion and (the absence of) selection

Voters’ preferences and electoral systems: the EuroVotePlus experiment in Italy

Motivated by the need to understand voting behaviour under different electoral rules, Laslier et al. (Eur Union Polit, 16(4):601–615, 2015) have conducted an online experiment, the EuroVotePlus experiment, focusing on the effects of the different rules adopted to elect members of the European parliament on voters’ behaviour. The experiment took place in several European countries in the 3 weeks before the 2014 elections for the European Parliament. This paper focuses on the Italian data. Firstly, we show that the behaviour of Italian respondents is consistent with the empirical findings at the European level. Then, we exploit the change from open list to closed list elections implemented in Italy in 1993 to investigate whether and how preferences over institutions are affected by experience. We find that respondents who voted using the open list system in Italy are more likely to prefer closed list systems, and that the effect is stronger the higher the number of open list elections the respondents have faced

Regional fiscal spillovers: The role of trade linkages

This paper examines how fiscal shocks in a given country affect foreign regions through regional trade linkages. Applying the local projection method to a panel of 222 NUTS-2 regions in 20 European countries during the period 1993–2020, we find that countries-to-regions fiscal spillovers are positive, statistically significant, persistent, and non-negligible in size. In addition, fiscal spillovers tend to be larger when the recipient region experiences a recession, when monetary policy of the recipient country is at the zero-lower-bound, and when the recipient region and the source country are both part of the European Monetary Union