Contiguità territoriale e shock sul consumo nelle regioni italiane

The hypothesis of complete consumption risk-sharing suggests that only uninsurable national and international disturbances should affect the growth of the regional consumption. Therefore, the correlation among regional consumption growth rates should be high. This work analyzes the issue of regional consumption risk-sharing in Italy over the period 1971-93. The empirical evidence is mixed: consumption correlations are high but other formal tests suggest the relevance of idiosincratic effects. In conclusion, the overall degree of consumption risk-sharing appears to be less than perfect

The ‘Right’ Price for Art Collectibles. A Quantile Hedonic Regression Investigation of Picasso Paintings

Different art objects are likely to be priced by means of different systems of hedonic characteristics; more precisely, different evaluation procedures for high and low price items are often postulated. However, the empirical evidence on this point is scant. The main purpose of this paper is to fill this gap by using the quantile hedonic regression approach. The empirical evidence, based on a data set of 716 Picasso paintings sold at auction worldwide, highlights the critical role of the price classes in determining the evaluation criteria of art items.hedonic price; auction; quantile regression; painting; Picasso

Assessing visitor satisfaction with tourism rejuvenation policies: the case of Rimini, Italy.

In this paper we assess the appeal of potential interventions on the tourism offer of Rimini, a popular Italian seaside holiday destination, by means of a choice modelling analysis. Tourism can be viewed as a composite good, its overall utility depending on the arrangement of the component characteristics. Our discrete choice experiments incorporate as attributes a number of possible changes to current tourist activities (the subject of public debate), including them in hypothetical alternative holiday packages. The conditional logit analysis indicates that tourists show lesser preference for interventions aimed at protecting the environmental integrity of the beach and greater preference for those, such as the creation of a pedestrianised seafront with late-night opening of amenities and facilities, that are likely to diminish the role of the traditional sea, sun and sand component of the overall holiday experience.

Real Interest Rate and Growth: An Empirical Note

Are restrictive monetary policies harmful to growth? The note aims at providing some empirical evidence to answer the question. A significant negative correlation between growth and real interest emerges over the period 1960-94; in the eighties this relationship strengthens. This result is in agreement with the traditional view of a long run positive link between growth and capital accumulation and a negative long run link between accumulation and the cost of capital. Moreover the outcome is in line with the view that links the slowdown in economic growth of the industrial countries over the last decades appears to the implementation of restrictive monetary policie

Istituzioni, Stabilità e Crescita nelle Regioni Italiane

Il lavoro analizza la relazione tra la diversa performance nella crescita economica delle regioni italiane nel periodo 1970-91, da un lato, e le caratteristiche di assetto istituzionale e di stabilità economica e sociale dall’altro. Gli indicatori per tali fenomeni, che risultano rilevanti nelle comparazioni internazionali, hanno un effetto più sfumato nel caso dell’esperienza delle regioni italiane

Credit risk and Basel II: Are non-profit firms financially different?

We estimate a model of credit risk for portfolios of Small and Medium-sized enterprises, conditional on being a non-profit or for-profit firms. The estimation is based on a unique dataset on Italian firms provided by a large commercial bank. We show that the main variables to identify creditworthiness are different for non-profit andcrucial for non-profit firms. Classification-JEL: G21, G28SME finance; Basel II; Retail banking; Non-profit

Demand Distribution Dynamics in Creative Industries: the Market for Books in Italy

We study the distribution dynamics of the demand for books in Italy. We find that for each of three broad sub-markets in which the book publishing industry can be classified Italian novels, foreign novels and essays sales over a three-year sample can be adequately fitted by a power law distribution. Our results can be plausibly interpreted in terms of a model of interactions among buyers exchanging information on the books they buy.Book publishing industry; Information transmission; Power law distribution.

How many Italies ? What Data Show about Growth and Convergence across Italian Regions, 1970-91

The paper analyses the evidence about the growth of the Italian regions over the period 1970-91; in particular it studies the beta-convergence across regions, the convergence of each region towards its possible steady-state equilibrium path and the existence of groups of regions sharing the same stochastic trend. Besides the specific results on Italian regions, the paper provides and analyses some applications of different econometric methods for the investigation of the growth process

The Economics of Local Tourist Systems

In this paper we analyse the Local Tourist System (LTS) as a particular case of Marshallian Industrial District. The LTS allows the identification of more effective policy tools for managing tourism. First, through the concept of LTS, the policy maker can take into account the complexity of tourism, characterised by a strong heterogeneity of goods, services and subjects involved; second, LTS helps promote a stronger co-ordination between the public and the private sector, by identifying a homogeneous territory and recognising its importance in tourists' decisions; third, through the LTS the policymaker can analyze the externalities and promotes the idea of collaborating networks in a context of local development. In the LTS framework, the anticommon problem can be analysed and contrasted. As the tourist has to buy different but intertwined goods which compose the holiday package, the failure in one of the markets can lead to the overall failure of the package. A LTS policy has to: i) co-ordinate the price policy of the different firms supplying “single components” of the tourist product; ii) fix the price of the whole product; iii) impute a price to each component. We demonstrate that, through price policy co-ordination and under general conditions, the LTS can increase the size of tourism and the firms’ profits, thereby reaching a more effective and efficient target in tourism policy. The recent introduction of LTS in the Italian legislation can be seen as a positive attempt of improving co-ordination in a complex sector such as tourism.Local tourist systems, Tourism policy

A Note on Multiplicative Uncertainty and Partisan Policies

In this paper we consider the effects of «multiplicative» uncertainty about the structure of the economy in the standard partisan model. An increase in the uncertainty decreases of the inflation rate pursued by the liberal policymaker, but increases the inflation rate pursued by the conservative policymaker. For certain configurations of the parameters, an increase in the uncertainty reduces the expected loss of both parties