Sen (J Polit Econ 78:152–157, 1970) has shown the possible contrast between the social preferences of individuals and their choices. This contrast prevents, in many situations, a social choice that satisfies both Pareto-optimality and liberalism. What liberalism can mean in the field of social choice and the relevance of social organization are briefly discussed. Sen's example, using game theory, determines

In this paper we present a dynamic discrete-time model that allows to investigate the impact of risk-aversion in an oligopoly characterized by a homogeneous non-storable good, sticky prices and uncertainty. The continuous-time limit of our formulation nests the classical dynamic oligopoly model with sticky prices by Fershtman and Kamien (Econometrica 55:1151–1164, 1987) and extends it by accommodating

As alcoholic beverages play a significant role in social and economic contexts, the taxation of alcohol and its policy regulations are an inevitably complex matter. This note pays a small tribute to the great contribution made by Anderson (J Wine Econ 15(1):42–70, 2020), with a specific focus on the EU wine sector. This text is far from exhaustive but provides a starting block for a more in-depth analysis

We investigate the nexus between TV watching and the general public opinion about the impact of immigrants on the economies of destination countries using evidence from the European Social Survey. We find, as expected, that low skilled workers and less educated respondents have a more negative view, likely due to the stronger competition threat they suffer from immigrants. Second, and more surprising

The Italian wine supply chain has performed well in recent decades both in terms of profitability and success on the domestic and international markets. This is despite the fact that it is fragmented in terms of products, prices and consumption context, and, in particular, despite the fact that it is characterised by an organisation that hinders the full exploitation of economies of scale. This paradox

This short literature review on wine economics introduces the Special Issue on wine of the Italian Economic Journal. Its goal is to provide non wine experts with an overall picture of recent trends of the wine sector and of major developments of the economic literature devoted to wine markets. As the wine market deeply changed through the last decades, the first section quickly outlines these changes

This paper deals with the relationship between regulatory compliance, bureaucratic corruption, lobbying and the industrial structure of a country. We show that lobbying and bureaucratic corruption can coexist at the macro level when we allow for heterogeneity in firm size. Countries with similar level of development are often characterized by very different industrial structures: we show the implications

This paper uses learning methods and optimization techniques to investigate the determinants of shock propagation in the Euro area for the period 2001–2015. First, principal component analyses are used with country bond yields to identify sub-periods and country groups; second, influencing factors for country bond yields are investigated with random forest models; lastly, shock propagation among groups

This paper sets an endogenous fertility model with a two-sector model: one for the final goods sector and the other for child care service sector. Results of theoretical analysis indicate that the subsidy for children raises the labor share of the child care service sector and that it can increase fertility. An aging population reduces fertility and the labor share of the child care service sector

The objective of this paper is twofold: firstly, it analyzes the evolution of frauds in the Italian wine value chain over the period 2007–2015, and then, using a properly disaggregated social accounting matrix (SAM) of the Italian economy, it simulates the impact of wine frauds on the national economy in terms of growth, employment, value added and income. The wine industry is the sector most exposed

This paper provides a simple example of the utility function with two consumption goods which can be calculated by hand to produce a Giffen good. It is based on the theoretical result by Kubler et al. (Am Econ Rev 103:1034–1053, 2013). Using a model of portfolio selection with a risk-free asset and a risky asset, they showed that there always exists a parameter set which assures that the risk-free

The main objective of this paper is to study indicators of individual wine reputation and how they may affect the price of wines in Friuli Venezia Giulia. The analysis is built on the assumption that consumers base their wine purchase decisions on easily available information such as expert quality ratings and reputation builds on past awards for a wine. We estimate a hedonic pricing model using a

This paper investigates the international wine trade based on a new sophistication index (called C-Consy) focused on import flows. We posit that the sophistication level of destination countries provides relevant information on the kind of competition a product is going to meet in the final market. The sophistication level for the clients of the major world exporters is assessed for the 2006/07–2016/17

The aim of this paper is to explore how debt contracts are affected by investment in asset specialization and by the dynamics of the secondary market for collateralized productive assets. Before applying for a loan, financially constrained firms face a specificity trade-off: asset specialization increases firms’ project returns, but decreases the liquidation value of assets in the secondary market

This paper analyzes Total Factor Productivity (TFP) in five European countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and UK), the USA and Japan between 1954 and 2017. It uses the common trend– common cycle (CTCC) approach to decompose series in trends and cycles. We find that the seven economies are structurally different and differently affected by similar shocks. We show that trend and cycle innovations

We build a framework to forecast out-of-sample any asset price movement in a tight window around the release of any macroeconomic indicator. As a case study, we examine the predictability of the EUR/USD exchange rate conditional on the market-based surprise in the first 60 min after the release of the United States Non-Farm Payrolls and ISM manufacturing index. We empirically investigate whether the

In this paper we provide fresh evidence on TFP performance in the Italian economy since 1995, taking into account the changing composition of primary inputs across different capital goods and employment skills, as well as technical progress embodied in different vintages of the productive assets. We first estimate a technical depreciation rate by using individual data on Italian industrial firms. We

I review recent developments in the economic analysis of crime, focusing in particular on organized crime and corruption. I first discuss the main challenges to the empirical identification of causal relationships—namely, measurement error due to endogenous reporting of crime and the fact that randomized controlled trials are rarely an option when studying crime. I then discuss recent advancements

Using a one-sector, discrete-time Ramsey model, we analyze and compare the implications for welfare, capital accumulation, and speed of convergence to the steady state of two classes of utility functions that represent Gorman preferences, namely homothetic and Stone–Geary preferences. For identical economies, we show that the preference structure does not affect only the capital dynamics and social

This work documents the construction of the new quarterly indicator of regional economic activity (Indicatore Trimestrale dell’Economia Regionale—ITER), which uses a parsimonious set of regional variables and combines them by means of temporal disaggregation techniques to obtain a quarterly index that is consistent with the official data on national and regional GDP and marked by a small lag compared

We investigate the phenomenon of corruption in an experimental setting. The first treatment studies the role of reciprocity in establishing corrupt relationships between two agents. Corruption occurs when public officials accept bribes and reward the briber at the expenses of others. The second treatment introduces two features that negatively affect bribery: increasing the cost of bribery and introducing

We analyze the economic consequences on firm profitability, performance, and investments of having another firm in the same market affiliated with a criminal organization. We do so by evaluating the spillover effects of a law providing the judicial administration of organized crime firms through the imposition of external managers in order to remove the connection to the criminal organization, and

The continuous evolution of the institutional and regulatory framework requires the development of analysis instruments able to support the policy maker in designing and evaluating the impact of specific policy measures for the achievement of selected targets. With this intent, the MACGEM-IT model is developed to measure the aggregate and disaggregated, direct and indirect impacts of economic policy

Public policies in the last 20 years have promoted in Italy the investment in renewable energy sources within the framework of climate change policies. Investment in renewables received generous incentives, leading also in Sicily to a rapid expansion in the capacity installed. We analyse whether rents from wind investment may have attracted Sicilian mafia. We argue that the wind business is particularly

Studies that estimate criminal peer effects need to define the reference group. For peer effects that develop in prison, researchers have used the amount of time inmates overlap in prison, sometimes in combination with nationality, to define such groups. Yet, there is often little discussion about such assumptions, which could potentially have important effects on the estimates of peer effects. We

This paper introduces a new measure of Roman roads that has been constructed for the Italian territory. The measure computes the length in kilometers of Roman roads at different administrative and territorial levels (NUTS, Local Labor Systems, grid cells), and contributes to the literature on historical infrastructures, providing a new precise measure to use for empirical purposes and easy to extend

Windfall government revenues may generate an increase in the occurrence of corruption by reducing the degree of political accountability. This paper empirically investigates the relationship between the accrual of large financial transfers from a central level of government and the incidence of corruption at the local level. To this purpose we analyze the case of EU funding to Southern Italy and exploit

This study aims to assess banks’ compliance in reporting suspicious transactions. It does so by estimating an econometric model on the suspicious transaction reports (STRs) filed by individual Italian banks from each of the provincial districts they operate in. Regressors include (1) indicators of banks’ operational activities, (2) measures of money laundering risk and (3) proxies of economic activity

Local governments suspected of Mafia infiltration can be dismissed in Italy through an administrative act not increasing formal deterrence but potentially signaling improved law enforcement among local communities. This paper finds that dismissals are associated to a persistent fall of petty crimes (e.g. thefts) but have little consequences on offenses more closely related to the activity of organized

Mark Twain is reputed to have remarked that history does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. While the Global Financial Crisis of 2008–2009 was not a catastrophe on the order of World War I, there is a broad similarity in the sequelae to both of these events—a failed attempt to return to pre-trauma normalcy, followed by a process of international economic disintegration in the face of changed geopolitical

This paper highlights the extent to which minimum income schemes in Italian regions improved the potential targeting and effectiveness of national minimum income measures introduced in 2017 and 2018. By exploiting detailed survey data on the income, wealth and living conditions of Italian households from the IT-SILC survey and applying micro-simulation techniques, I first provide estimates of the overall

Following new evidence on increasing wealth concentration across several advanced countries, the topic has been attracting a great deal of attention. Estimating the size distribution of wealth and understanding its determinants is an exercise surrounded with high levels of uncertainty and substantial controversies, but remains crucial to guide policy interventions. This short note attempts to link

I present a merger model where a merged entity is assumed to acquire the market leadership from a linear, symmetric, simultaneous, homogeneous good, quantity-setting oligopoly and where efficiency gains are ruled out. If firms cannot merge to monopoly, mergers occur in waves, and for each number of pre-merger firms, I endogenize: (i) the number of mergers in a wave; (ii) the number of firms involved