Taxation and parental time allocation under different assumptions on altruism

This paper examines the effects of labor income taxation on parental time allocation in an OLG model in which child care arrangements, that is the combination of parental and non-parental time, matter for human capital accumulation. We show that the sign of the impact of labor income taxation on parental time with children and on growth critically depends on the assumption on the altruistic motives behind the choice of devoting time to children.     

Students’ opinions on teaching and services provided by the Italian Universities: a proposal for a new evaluation scheme

Quality & Quantity - In Italy, the evaluation of the internal effectiveness of academic training courses has been substantiated, for over 20 years, in periodical surveys on...     

An empirical analysis of the relationship between university investments in Technology Transfer Offices and academic spin‐offs

The aim of this paper is to analyze the role of university Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs) in contributing to the creation and the performance of academic spin‐offs (ASOs). More specifically, it investigates the relationship between resources invested in TTOs in term of employees and the creation and growth of ASOs. The empirical analysis refers to Italy, where since 1999 academicians have been allowed to be actively involved in setting up companies for the ‘industrial use of research’. We used data on ASOs and resources invested by Italian universities in TTOs during the 2002–2011 period to investigate if and to what extent such investments contributed to the birth and growth of ASOs. We also controlled the results using information on university and on local context, in which university is located. The results of the empirical analysis show that in a first phase academicians reacted more promptly than universities to the opportunities offered by the new legislation, which may in part be due to the organizational rigidity that characterizes Public Administration in Italy. However, the empirical analysis also shows that after this initial phase the size of the TTOs (in terms of employees) has had a positive influence on the number of new ASOs (i.e. birth), but not on the performance of ASOs (i.e. growth), which is influenced by both long‐term investments in research (i.e. the quality of research results) and other variables linked to the regional and national contexts, such as the presence of incubators or the level of economic development. Our results regard a widely studied topic and should provide incremental findings for the community of entrepreneurship scholars and relevant implications for policy makers and TTO managers.     

Global and local determinacy in a one-step forward looking New Keynesian model

In this paper we consider a New Keynesian model for optimal monetary policy in a staggered fashion. We provide the relations of a non linear model of general economic equilibrium, implementing a suitable Taylor-type interest rate rule. We characterize the conditions that guarantee local determinacy and explore conditions under which local bifurcations of the target equilibrium may occur. Afterwards, we argue how local determinacy might be associated with global indeterminacy, providing some numerical examples.     

Financial development,institutions, and poverty alleviation: an empirical analysis

The aim of this article is to analyse empirically whether the level of institutional quality influences how financial development affects poverty for a sample of developing countries covering the period from 1984 to 2012. Using an interaction term constructed as a product between financial development and institutional quality we find that the pro-poor impact of financial development decreases as the quality of institutions rises. Such a differential effect can be ascribed to the capacity of banks to provide functions that mimic those performed by an institutional framework that works well. The results of this article can be used for policy management.     

The contribution of minimum wage valorization policy to the decline in household income inequality in Brazil: A decomposition approach

There is a vast literature that estimates the effect of the minimum wage on wage inequality in various countries. However, as the minimum wage directly affects nonlabor income of families in some countries (in the Brazilian case via the benefits of the pension system and of certain social programs), this article extends the empirical analysis by studying the effects of the minimum wage on the level of inequality of household income as a whole. To accomplish that we employ a decomposition method that gauges the contribution of the increases in the minimum wage that occurred in recent decades in Brazil through the labor and nonlabor sources of household income. The results show that the minimum wage had a contribution of 64 percent to the observed fall in income inequality between 1995 and 2014 and that pensions were the most relevant channel over this period.     

Income concentration and market demand

We analyze the effects of income concentration and income dispersionon market demand and its elasticity. We show that, followingan increase in income concentration towards the middle (measuredby variations in mean preserving spread), the increase in demandfaced by firms which serve at the margin middle income consumers,is associated with an increase in price elasticity—accordingly,the positive effects of the size of the market becoming widerare amplified by a higher degree of competition. Our resultshold for a large number of possible income distributions.     

Optimal manipulation rules in a mixed oligopoly

We study the optimal manipulation rules of a public firm’s objective function in a mixed oligopoly with imperfect product substitutability. We start with a baseline duopoly model and compare the solutions under quantity and price competition, and the way they are affected by product substitutability. This allows us to show that partial privatization, strategic delegation and other specific government’s commitments on the objective function of the public management can be looked at as special cases of these optimal rules, and to evaluate the viability of these policies under the two modes of competition. In this framework, we also discuss the equivalence between manipulation of the objective function and Stackelberg leadership. Since optimal manipulation rules change as new dimensions are added, we also derive the optimal rules under oligopoly, quadratic costs, and competition of international firms. This fairly general unified framework allows to discuss the impact of these factors on the government’s implementation policies of the optimal manipulation rules.