A tale of two Italies: ‘access-orders’ and the Italian regional divide

ABSTRACT

This paper uses the ‘access orders’ paradigm developed by North, Wallis, and Weingast [(2009). Violence and social order: A conceptual framework for interpreting recorded human history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press] to analyse the case of the Italian North–South economic divide. In line with their framework, we collect and discuss several social and political indicators over the long-run, at the regional level. Firstly we looked at data on the pre-conditions for the establishment of an open-access order, such as murders per capita (a proxy for control over violence), voting turnout and referendums participation (proxies for political legitimacy), and the impersonality of exchange. We then showed evidence of different access orders in the North and in the South, using the information on human capital formation, women participation in the labour market, and referendum results. On the basis of this evidence, we argue that, despite being part of the same State and subject to the same formal institutions, the North of the country progressively developed into an open-access order, while the South remained a form of limited access order.

Institutional differences are linked to specific aspects of the economic performance of the two areas, thus the ‘access order’ paradigm appears to be an effective conceptual scheme to explain the North–South economic divide.     

The European Monetary Policy Responses During the Pandemic Crisis

This paper uses an event-based analysis to describe how the European Central Bank’s (ECB’s) policy responses to the pandemic crisis have affected the European financial and economic system. The result of our exercise, which is based on the examination of the main measures taken by the ECB during 2020, is that these responses have positively affected the European economic system by improving banks’ lending activity and by indirectly creating room for expansionary fiscal policies in the euro area’s high-debt countries that do not have fiscal capacity.

     

Italy in the Renaissance: a leading economy in the European context, 1350–1550

A well‐known debate on the Renaissance economy was held in this journal in 1962–4 between Roberto S. Lopez and Harry Miskimin on one hand and Carlo M. Cipolla on the other. More than half a century later, this topic can be reconsidered in the light of much wider information on the late medieval/early modern Italian economy. Using data on population, urbanization, prices, wages, and GDP, this article outlines the macroeconomic trends in central and northern Italy in the age of the Renaissance (1350–1550). The frequent plagues during the early Renaissance—that is, between 1348 and 1450—decimated the population, probably causing more deaths than in other European countries. Hence resources per worker increased and labour productivity, incomes, and standards of living improved remarkably. A favourable economic environment thus seems to have been a pre‐condition for the Renaissance in culture, art, and politics and the spread of new kinds of consumer demand. From the middle of the fifteenth century, living standards gradually worsened and eventually reached the low levels that had prevailed prior to the Renaissance.     

On Corporate Tax Asymmetries and Neutrality

This article discusses the effects of corporate tax asymmetries under investment irreversibility. We introduce a tax scheme where the tax base is given by the firm's return net of a rate of relief. When the firm's return is less than the imputation rate, however, no tax refunds are allowed. Unlike symmetric tax systems, the scheme proposed is neutral with respect not only to income uncertainty but also to policy uncertainty.     

Mapping the antecedents of telework diffusion: firm‐level evidence from Italy

Previous literature has studied telework practices predominantly from the employees' perspective rather than exploring its use at the firm level. With the objective of contributing to reducing this research gap, the relationship between firms' adoption of telework and the firms' technological, organisational and environmental contexts is explored. Data were obtained from a survey conducted between 2005 and 2009 on a sample of 1,134 Italian firms in the Piedmont region. The results show an overall increase in the diffusion of telework primarily attributable to a rise in the adoption of ‘mobile’ work rather than home‐based forms of telework. The results also show that firms that had previously adopted information systems supporting core business processes and knowledge management were more inclined to adopt telework. Telework arrangements were more widely diffused among firms facing a growing and geographically dispersed market demand, and also in the contexts of higher levels of human capital and lower capital intensity.     

The fundamental theorem of asset pricing under transaction costs

This paper proves the fundamental theorem of asset pricing with transaction costs, when bid and ask prices follow locally bounded càdlàg (right-continuous, left-limited) processes. The robust no free lunch with vanishing risk condition (RNFLVR) for simple strategies is equivalent to the existence of a strictly consistent price system (SCPS). This result relies on a new notion of admissibility, which reflects future liquidation opportunities. The RNFLVR condition implies that admissible strategies are predictable processes of finite variation. The Appendix develops an extension of the familiar Stieltjes integral for càdlàg integrands and finite-variation integrators, which is central to modelling transaction costs with discontinuous prices.