RISULTATI RICERCA

Simon’s bounded rationality assumption is not to be interpreted as an adaptation of the neoclassical assumption of global rationality (i.e., it is not something to decide once for all contexts), but as an ‘appropriate’ rationality assumption (i.e. as an empirically based rationality). As a consequence, the notion of bounded rationality can be understood as a set of conditions which determine a special context of (non-completable) contractual incompleteness. In this way Simon’s Research Program becomes a general logical framework for both the criticisms to neoclassical framework which are included in two of the recent approaches to the organizational theory of the firm: Transaction Costs Economics (which takes into account uncertainty on future troughout bounds to rationality) and the New Property Rights Theory (where the efficiency is based on a comparison among possible property rights allocations, accepting sub-optimal solutions).

On Sharecropping: A Review of Modern Theories (di Pasquale Commendatore) - ABSTRACT: In this paper, we provide an analytical treatment and comparison of the three principal pure forms of land tenure: owner-occupancy, fixed-rent tenancy and share-rent tenancy or sharecropping. The analysis is of a static nature following the standard treatment of this topic in the literature. We provide also a review of the debate on the efficiency of sharecropping. In doing so, we look more attentively at some crucial aspects of land tenancy that have emerged in recent contributions and that have been overlooked in previous assessments of share-rent tenancy, such as the role of conventions, the existence of imperfect credit markets and the consequent relevance of the timing of payments. A proper treatment of these aspects requires the framing of the existing analyses in a dynamic context.

Total Factor Productivity Growth and Public Capital: The Case of Italy (di Carmelo Petraglia) - ABSTRACT:This paper is aimed at contributing to the debate on the relationship between productive public spending and productivity growth in the Italian regions over the period 1970-1995, the main novelty being the decomposition of productivity growth into technical efficiency change and technological progress by means of Data Envelopment Analysis. The Banker test is used in order to test empirically the significance of public capital in the DEA model, concluding that it would not be correct to consider it as a direct productive input. However, public capital turns out to be positively correlated with productivity growth and both of its mutually exclusive and exhaustive components. These results lead us to conclude that public capital has contributed to productivity gains not directly by entering the production function but as a positive externality to regional economies.

The prolonged Italian disinflation ended in 1997 has often been considered as a sort of prize for collective sacrifices. We provide a different view on disinflation, based on the analysis of the redistributive phenomena and the slow growth that it may provoke. From the results of a VAR analysis we derive some empirical support to the assumption that agents are not always able to predict the inflation rate. Then, we provide some theoretical foundations to the idea that unexpected disinflation redistributes income from debtors to creditors and, by this way, could inhibit the growth rate of the economy. From this point of view, disinflation can be considered as a cause of collective sacrifices instead of a prize for them.

Is Inflation a Monetary Phenomenon Only? A Non Monetarist Episode of Inflation: The Italian Case (di Giancarlo Bertocco) - ABSTRACT:The publication of the second edition of Fratianni and Spinelli’s Monetary History of Italy offers the opportunity to analyze the causes behind the inflation pattern in Italy in the three decades preceding the entry of the country in the European Monetary Union. This paper has two objectives. The first consists in showing the limits of the explanation of Italian inflation based on the monetarist theory; the second consists in providing an alternative explanation whereby the pattern of Italian inflation basically depends on the trend of production costs and on the behavior of companies in connection with mark-up definition.

This work examines the main theoretical and empirical interpretations of the effects of FDI on the productivity of local firms and, in particular, the way in which productivity spillovers are related to inter or intra regional differences. In studying the Italian manufacturing sector, using cross-sectional data, we found that the stronger presence of multinational enterprises increased the level of domestic productivity, but productivity spillovers were concentrated only in the north-western area of Italy. This indicates not only the existence of a geographic component in the spillovers from FDI but also the peculiarity of Italian manufacturing structure, where different models of production, such as the network enterprise model in the North-west, the industrial district model in the North-east and the backward model in the South, coexist.

This article investigates the quasi-object notion proposed by Michel Serres, by which the collective is instituted around the circulation of a particular object, often unnameable, that implies determined relational modalities. In the political ensemble the quintessence of the quasi-object is the precious corpse, which is intended as the king corpse, the elected or predestined corpse, and it has to be hidden. On behalf of the notion of the quasi-object is possible to describe the Aldo Moro’s kidnapping and murder case either under a anthropological perspective (symbolic exchange and victimary substitution) either about the mutations of the object status. Referring to the object status is advanced an evolutionary hypothesis: the archaic object is closed (the book, the brick, the bread) the modern object is cable (the cinema), the contemporary one is wireless. Moro’s case is located between the cable age and the wireless age. Around this hypothesis are analysed some problems on theory of writing and theory of spectacle.