Timing of Mitigation and Technology Availability in Achieving a Low-Carbon World

This paper analyzes the economic and investment implications of a series of climate mitigation scenarios, characterized by different levels of ambition for long-term stabilization goals and transitional pathways. Results indicate that although milder climate objectives can be achieved at moderate costs, stringent stabilization paths, compatible with the 2°C target, might require significant economic resources. Innovation and technology are shown to be able to mitigate, but not structurally alter, this trade-off. Technologies that allow capturing CO₂ from the atmosphere are shown to be important for expanding the feasibility space of stringent climate policies, though only if deployed at a scale which would represent a tremendous challenge. In general, the analysis indicates that the timing of mitigation is an important factor of cost containment, with early action being desirable. It also elaborates on the set of mitigation strategies and policies that would be required to achieve climate protection at maximum efficiency.     

Do technology externalities justify restrictions on emission permit trading?

International emission trading is an important flexibility mechanism, but its use has been often restricted on the ground that access to international carbon credits can undermine the domestic abatement effort reducing the incentive to innovate and, eventually, lowering the pace of climate policy-induced technological change. This paper examines the economics that is behind these concerns by studying how a cap to the trade of carbon offsets influences innovation, technological change, and welfare. By using a standard game of abatement and R&D, we investigate the main mechanisms that shape these relationships. We also use a numerical integrated assessment model that features environmental and technology externalities to quantify how limits to the volume, the timing, and the regional allocation of carbon offsets affect climate policy costs and the incentive to invest in innovation and low-carbon technologies.Results indicate that, for moderate caps on the amount tradable emissions permits and sufficiently high technology spillovers, global innovation and technical change would increase and that this additional innovative effort could lead to economic efficiency gains. The numerical analysis confirms that when constraints are close to 15% of domestic abatement, efficiency losses are small because they are partly compensated by more technological spillovers and lower energy prices. Under a broad range of parameters, restrictions are costly for the constrained countries, but always beneficial for unconstrained ones.     

Perceived quality of public services, liquidity constraints, and the demand of private specialist care

In this article we offer direct evidence on the role of perceived quality differences in publicly provided health care services, in determining the incentive to opt out for private services and, for poor individuals, short-run credit constraints in the access to these services. We concentrate on private specialist care, a category of services for which disparities in the access are highest. We use Bank of Italy—SHIW data to first study the determinants of demand for private and public specialist care, estimating probit and bivariate probit models, and ZIP models. We then apply the Carneiro–Heckman procedure to identify the share of people constrained and study how perceived quality of public services affects the percentage of people short run constrained. Our estimates suggest the presence of large territorial differences, as for the role of income and the quality of public services.     

Temporary hires and innovative investments

The flexicurity approach claims a positive effect of flexible labour on firm performance, also through an increased ability to innovate. Critics consider it a deregulation of the labour market, decreasing investment in human capital and innovation. We contribute to this broad debate providing an estimate of the relationships linking innovative investment, substitution investment, permanent hires and temporary hires. In particular, we aim at affirming or denying that innovative investments are accompanied by a specific kind of workforce, being it stable or flexible. In doing so, we contribute to bridge the gap among two quite separate strands of literature, as existing literature usually analyses capital and labour separately. Estimating a nonlinear recursive equation system we highlight a significant increase in the likelihood of hiring on a permanent base when the firm innovates; this holds till 2008. Afterward, during the crisis, innovating firms are more likely to hire using temporary contracts instead, a possible signal of a cost saving strategy adopted in a loose labour market by firms still able to innovate. Furthermore, both permanent and temporary hires never depend on increases in labour costs; however, substitution investment increases when labour cost increases, maybe in an attempt to increase labour productivity through a more efficient capital equipment.     

Asymmetric competition and collection rates differentials: determinants of prices in international telephone service markets

The paper investigates determinants of pricing in international telephone service markets. The analysis—focused on 24 worldwide national markets—shows the impact of several telecommunications-specific and macroeconomic variables on collection rate differentials and traffic imbalance between countries. An econometric model is aimed at performing quantitative analysis and providing support to future telecommunications policies.     

Asymmetry in mobile access charges: is it an effective regulatory measure?

This paper analyses the regulation of the market of voice call termination on mobile networks, by considering the remedy of asymmetric access charges and the hypothesis of discriminatory retail pricing. In the two way interconnection, the operators revenue depends on two factors: the retail price and the access charge. If the retail prices are different between calls that terminate on the same network (on-net) and calls that terminate on the rival network (off-net), the competition is more complex, involving positive networks externalities for the incumbent operator. In order to reduce the competitive disadvantage for new entrants and smaller operators many European regulation authorities have introduced the remedy of asymmetric access charges. This paper is aimed at analysing the effectiveness of this regulatory measure, assuming that operators are differentiated in terms of brand loyalty and cost structure.     

Innovation and growth through local and global interaction

This paper investigates the research and development activity of heterogeneous and rationally bounded firms. The latter conduct this activity through in-house research and by collecting information originating in other firms’ spillovers. Thus, research and development activity owes both to independent searching and to interaction diffusing information. We study the conditions under which this idiosyncratic effort yields effects that have either local, system-wise negligible impacts or cumulate to generate significant aggregate ones. In the latter case, global effects feed back upon the incentive to innovate and therefore on the strength of local interaction as well as on autonomous research efforts. It is these dynamic forces that we model. We compare cases in which significant aggregate effects do emerge with cases in which they do not and study their outcome on innovation-directed investment and on long-term growth.     

Forecasts of US short-term interest rates: A flexible forecast combination approach

This paper develops a flexible approach to combine forecasts of future spot rates with forecasts from time-series models or macroeconomic variables. We find empirical evidence that, accounting for both regimes in interest rate dynamics, and combining forecasts from different models, helps improve the out-of-sample forecasting performance for US short-term rates. Imposing restrictions from the expectations hypothesis on the forecasting model are found to help at long forecasting horizons.     

The Effect of EU Antitrust Investigations and Fines on a Firm's Valuation

EU antitrust investigations involve a sequence of events which affect the investigated firm's market value. We model these relationships and estimate their impact on firms' share prices. On average, a surprise inspection reduces a firm's share price by 2.89%, an infringement decision reduces it by 3.57%. The Court judgments do not have a statistically significant effect. Overall, we find that the total effect of the antitrust action ranges from ?3.03% to ?4.55% of a firm's market value. Fines account for no more than 8.9% of this loss, and we conjecture that most of the loss is due to the cessation of illegal activities.     

Reasoning under uncertainty and multi-criteria decision making in data privacy

By means of an integration of decision theory and probabilistic models, we explore and develop methods for improving data privacy. Our work encompasses disclosure control tools in statistical databases and privacy requirements prioritization; in particular we propose a Bayesian approach for the on-line auditing in Statistical Databases and Pairwise Comparison Matrices for privacy requirements prioritization. The first approach is illustrated by means of examples in the context of statistical analysis on the census and medical data, where no salary (resp. no medical information), that could be related to a specific employee (resp. patient), must be released; the second approach is illustrated by means of examples, such as an e-voting system and an e-banking service that have to satisfy privacy requirements in addition to functional and security ones. Several fields in the social sciences, economics and engineering will benefit from the advances in this research area: e-voting, e-government, e-commerce, e-banking, e-health, cloud computing and risk management are a few examples of applications for the findings of this research.