Wage Indexation, Employment and Inflation

Price versus productivity-indexing is considered in a model of monetary policy with incomplete information and wage bargaining. In a perfectly price-indexed economy, the inflationary bias due to lack of credibility is eliminated. However, productivity-indexing is more appropriate to dampen macroeconomic fluctuations that are caused by real disturbances. We show that productivity-indexing alone guarantees both price and employment stability, provided the government's reputation is good enough and the union's bargaining power is not too strong. This reduces the degree of price indexation as the union becomes weaker and the government's reputation improves. Productivity-indexing is desirable with volatile productivity processes and weak unions.
JEL classification : E 24; E 52     

The spatial coverage of shipping lines and container terminal operators

The aim of this paper is to provide a quantitative basis for the discussions about globalization of carriers and container terminal operators. A measuring framework is developed that allows for the comparison of the distribution of ship carrying capacity across various regions, and the comparison of the distribution of terminal throughput worldwide. This approach also allows the investigation of the degree to which liner shipping networks match related terminal portfolios.The main outcomes highlight significant differences between the geographical scope of liner networks, and between the coverage of corresponding terminal portfolios. Interesting results emerge from the matching of networks of integrated operators: early-movers such as Maersk and latecomers such as MSC have very different levels of vertical integration.     

Individual accountability in teams

We consider a model of team production in which the principal observes only the team output, but agents can monitor one another (at a cost) and provide reports to the principal. We consider the problem faced by a principal who is prevented from penalizing an agent without evidence showing that the agent failed to complete his assigned actions. We show the first-best (high effort but no monitoring) can be achieved, but only if the principal assigns second-best actions. The principal requires monitoring, but agents do not monitor, and as long as output is high, the principal does not penalize agents who fail to monitor. If the principal has the responsibility for monitoring, the first-best outcome cannot be achieved, thus we identify an incentive for delegated monitoring even when agents have no informational advantage.     

Wealth and Income Inequality in Europe

While it has long been apparent that global levels of wealth and income inequality have been steadily increasing since the 1970s, the issue received scant attention in Europe until the recent fi nancial crisis and the resulting Great Recession illuminated for the general public just how great the chasm between the very rich and everybody else had grown. This realisation was coupled with an increased focus on inequality among economists and other academics, leading to a fresh drive for policy ideas to remedy the alarming trend. This Forum comprises a diverse range of viewpoints on the recent history and dynamics of inequality within Europe, each striving to defi ne the root causes in the various countries being examined. The defi nition of these causes, of course, can inform the direction of policies aimed at alleviating the growing inequality in many European countries and thereby curtail one of the major political and social issues of our time.     

Which factors are perceived as obstacles for the growth of Italian academic spin-offs?

During the last decades, academic spin-offs have received increasing attention from both researchers and practitioners, mainly due to their ability to advance industrial application of scientific knowledge. In the past, scholars believed that these organisations were subjected to fast growth after their establishment. Only in the last decade, scholars realise that the fast-growing perspective hypothesised was an oversimplification, as the majority of high-tech academic spin-offs growth slowly or remain small in size for long time. The aim of our study is to investigate the reasons that inhibit the growth of established academic spin-offs, focusing on the Italian context. Through the implementation of the Delphi technique and of the fuzzy logic we derive new and relevant results, for scholars, spin-offs’ managers and policy-makers.     

The role of human capital and innovation in economic development: evidence from post-Malthusian Prussia

The effect of human capital on growth involves multiple channels. On the one hand, an increase in human capital directly affects economic growth by enhancing labor productivity in production. On the other hand, human capital is an important input into R&D and therefore increases labor productivity indirectly by accelerating technological change. In addition, different types of human capital such as basic and higher education or training-on-the-job might play different roles in both production and innovation activities. We merge individual data on valuable patents granted in Prussia in the late nineteenth-century with county-level data on literacy, craftsmanship, secondary schooling, and income tax revenues to explore the complex relationship between various types of human capital, innovation, and income. We find that the Second Industrial Revolution can be seen as a transition period when it comes to the role of human capital. As in the preceding First Industrial Revolution, “useful knowledge” embodied in master craftsmen was related to innovation, especially of independent inventors. As in the subsequent twentieth century, the quality of basic education was associated with both workers’ productivity and firms’ R&D processes. In a final step, we show that literacy had also a negative effect on fertility which increased with innovation. In general, our findings support the notion that the accumulation of basic human capital was crucial for the transition to modern economic growth.     

On the generic strategic stability of Nash equilibria if voting is costly

Summary. We prove that for generic plurality games with positive cost of voting, the number of Nash equilibria is finite. Furthermore all the equilibria are regular, hence stable sets as singletons.JEL Classification Numbers: C72, D72.We would like to thank Luisa Bassotto, Marco Celentani, Mamoru Kaneko, and participants at the 6 International Conference on Current Trends in Economics for helpful comments. We also thank an anonymous referee of this journal for precious advices that have substantially improved this paper. This paper was partially written while Francesco was visiting Tor Vergata University, which he thanks for hospitality and financial support. The usual disclaimer applies.     

Gender Discrimination,Entrepreneurial Talent and Self-Employment

The trend of female self-employment in Italy is stable, with a low level of participation which confirms the prediction of economic theory on discrimination. We contend that gender discrimination alters the distribution of entrepreneurial talent between employees and self-employed workers. This gives rise to the prediction that the self-employed women are less likely to survive when self-employed than men because the lesser entrepreneurial talent of women will increase their risk of failure. Applying Markovian analysis to ISTAT’s labor market transition matrices we verify this prediction: Many women try to set up on their own, but they fail to remain self-employed both because their lesser entrepreneurial talent and because they try to become entrepreneurs without any previous experience of work. ‘If you think you’re so discriminated against, why don’t you set up on your own?’