In post-Unification Italy the cyclical movements of the economy largely reflected those in the production of durable goods. The engineering industry has been seen as one that transformed metal into machines: its metal consumption suggests that investment in machinery followed the Kuznets-cycle...

We consider a model in which educational investments entail productivity gains, signaling power, and social returns. The latter depend on the relative position the agent occupies in one of three di¤erent dimensions: (i) his innate characteristics, (ii) his level of schooling, and (iii) his...

In Italy two censuses were taken in 1911: the usual demographic census, that contains labor-force data, and the first industrial census, that contains employment data. The two yield aggregate figures that are very far apart. The literature directly concerned with estimating industrial employment...

This paper presents the second-generation estimates for the Italian engineering industry in 1911, a year documented both by the customary demographic census, and the first industrial census. The first part of this paper uses the census data to estimate the industry’s value added, sector...

The reconstruction of the historical national accounts for post-Unification Italy is proceeding. The national time series most recently compiled are those for the all-important engineering industry; this paper presents their regional counterparts. The engineering industry is very unevenly...

In the literature the (Italian) engineering industry is seen as one that transformed metal into machines; its time path is inferred from that of its consumption of metal. Newly recovered evidence indicates that far more metal was turned into (traditional) hardware than into (modern) machines....

This note introduces and discusses the concept of pu-dominance in the context of finite games in normal form. It then presents the pu-dominance criterion for equi- librium selection. The pu-dominance criterion is inspired by and closely related to the p-dominance criterion (Morris et al., 1995)...

We introduce and examine a game in which players can steal parts of a homo- geneous and perfectly divisible pie from each other. The expected effectiveness of a player's theft is proportional to the share of the pie he currently owns. We show how the incentives to preempt or to follow the rivals...

We study a rent-seeking contest in which players have heterogeneous and private valuations. In addition to their own type, agents only know that all valuations are drawn from an unspeciÂ…ed distribution, of which they only know the mean. We obtain a closed-form solution for agentsÂ’...

This paper formalizes the pervasive phenomenon of the self-serving bias within the framework of reference dependent preferences. This formulation allows the stating of a simple rule to assess the existence of the bias at the aggregate level as well as a procedure that identifies the minimum...