Giampaolo Garzarelli

This article contributes to an institutional economics analysis of the public economy by answering the following question: what is the role of intergovernmental grants in laboratory federalism? In line with factual evidence, the fiscal federalism literature on policy experimentation hints that grants can be employed to stimulate policy innovation t...

How do physical capital accumulation and total factor productivity (TFP) individually add to economic growth? We approach this question from the perspective of the quality of physical capital and labor, namely the age of physical capital and human capital. We build a unique dataset by explicitly calculating the age of physical capital for each coun...

What is the tenet upon which the public policy of lockdown by fiat experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic is based on? The work approaches this question about the rationale of the mandatory shelter-in-place policy as an interpersonal exchange of rights, but where the exchange occurs coercively instead of voluntarily. It compares, in positive poli...

Do national and local newspapers both impact voter turnout? This paper tackles this question by employing data from a unique dataset that collects detailed national and local newspapers, politico-institutional and socio-economic information for Italy during 1980–2007. We use a Dynamic Panel Data with Instrumental Variables methodology that allows f...

Purpose-The article investigates whether variety of democracy affects the probability to employ public subsidies for credit support by small-and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) led by female entrepreneurs. Design/methodology/approach-Building on the literature on democracy and on gender differences, it leverages a large firm-and country-level dat...

The work concentrates on the implications of the idealistic and the political realism senses of protecting classical liberalism for entangled political economy through the economics framework of duality. While familiar political economy predicts the duality or equivalence of maximizing liberty and of minimizing coercion, we find that this is not th...

The work concentrates on the implications of the idealistic and the political realism senses of protecting classical liberalism for entangled political economy through the economics framework of duality. It finds that entangled political economy reveals a failure of the primal problem of duality, but not of the dual one. The modeling survival of th...

The work concentrates on the implications of the idealistic and the political realism senses of protecting classical liberalism for entangled political economy through the economics framework of duality. It finds that entangled political economy reveals a failure of the primal problem of duality, but not of the dual one. The modeling survival of th...

What is the tenet upon which the public policy of lockdown by fiat experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic is based on? The work approaches this question about the rationale of the mandatory shelter-in-place policy as an interpersonal exchange of rights, but where the exchange occurs coercively instead of voluntarily. It compares, in positive poli...

We point out that governance is better viewed as existing along a spectrum of rules rather than as either-or trade-offs in kinds of rules. This means that governance concepts at polar extremes, such as "abstract" and "concrete" orders, though useful heuristic tools for analysis and modeling, are also more properly interpreted as being nuanced in na...

What is the tenet upon which the public policy of lockdown by fiat experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic is based on? The work approaches this question about the rationale of the mandatory shelter-in-place policy as an interpersonal exchange of rights, but where the exchange occurs coercively instead of voluntarily. It compares, in positive poli...

What is the tenet upon which the public policy of lockdown by fiat experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic is based on? The work approaches this question about the rationale of the mandatory shelter-in-place policy as an interpersonal exchange of rights, but where the exchange occurs coercively instead of voluntarily. It compares, in positive poli...

The purpose of this work is to bring into more explicit contact the theory of commons as developed by Elinor Ostrom and collaborators with the theory of order as developed by Friedrich A. von Hayek. We do so by shifting emphasis from analyzing different types of goods in terms of their intrinsic properties, to goods being analyzed in terms of how t...

Does a corrupt politico-institutional environment affect the demand of public subsidies for credit access – so-called public guarantee schemes – by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) helmed by female entrepreneurs? The paper tackles this question by using a large sample of European SMEs over 2010–2014 while also carefully addressing possible...

In “The Law of Selection in the Public Economy as Compared to the Market Economy,” Professor Francesco Forte (1982) – contemporary doyen of the Scienza delle finanze tradition – extended an invitation to consider the public economy by means of evolutionary principles of selection. Not many replied to Professor Forte's invitation. This paper is a de...

Why is populist ideology so popular? We address this question through some observations about the recent rise of populism in the West, Europe, and Italy. We find that populism does not genuinely rest on a clear-cut, original ideology, but on some borrowed prescriptive "regularities". This renders populist ideology akin to a bouillabaisse-a soup com...

This article reports on scope economies between teaching and research directly from the classroom. The economies regard novel research insights gained from teaching two approaches for the study of fiscal federalism-namely, First-and Second-generation theories of fiscal federalism (FGT and SGT). The basic conclusion is that the SGT ought to more exp...

During the second half of 2006, Giampaolo Garzarelli was researching the yet unsorted Ludwig Moritz Lachmann Archives at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, to see if there was something of interest to consider for an institutional economics project on Lachmann. To the best of his recollections, the archival material at...

Background: A major question that received the attention of numerous theoretical and empirical studies during the past few decades relates to the issue of output growth decomposition and the sources of economic growth. The literature focuses on two sources of growth: factor accumulation (mainly physical capital) and total factor productivity (TFP)...

To what extent do physical capital accumulation and total factor productivity (TFP) contribute to output growth in Sub-Saharan Africa? The paper answers this question by decomposing output growth through the methodology of stochastic frontier. We find that, over our sample period (1996-2014), the contribution of physical capital to total growth exc...

This paper anatomizes how the theory of internal organization of the firm relates to that of internal organization of government. This broad issue is approached by narrowing matters down to a specific type of internal organization of government: fiscal federalism. The paper introduces elements for a public theory of the firm by theoretically combin...

This is the correct version of the article that should have been published in International Tax Law Review/Rivista di diritto tributario internazionale, 1(January/ April): 79-106(2018). (A previous draft was published by mistake. Please employ page numbers in this draft as in published version, that is, use pages 79-106 and NOT 1-28 as here.) Thi...

We suggest that we push our thinking about the production process from the perspective of a Lachmannian capital theory to consider those kinds of goods that are not typically thought of as capital goods, but perhaps should be. We have in mind intellectual infrastructures, which on our account are jointly produced capital goods.

During the second half of 2006, Giampaolo Garzarelli was researching the yet unsorted Ludwig Moritz Lachmann Archives at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, to see if there was something of interest to consider for what eventually became Foss and Garzarelli (2007). To the best of his recollections the archival material...

How do physical capital accumulation and Total Factor Productivity (TFP) individually add to economic growth? We approach this question from the perspective of the quality of both labor and physical capital, namely human capital and the age of physical capital. We build a unique dataset by explicitly calculating the age of physical capital for each...

A memory of Domenico da Empoli in both English and Italian.

How do physical capital accumulation and total factor productivity (TFP) individually add to economic growth? We approach this question from the perspective of the quality of physical capital and labor, namely the age of physical capital and human capital. We build a unique dataset by explicitly calculating the age of physical capital for each coun...

Political institutions in Africa are known to be different from political institutions elsewhere (e.g., Iliffe 2013[2007]; Osafo-Kwaako and Robinson 2013). One example comes from precolonial southern Africa, where if an individual (or group) disagreed with the ruler, he would simply exit the ruler's polity to find another area in which to establish...

Do economic variables operate through the channel of public governance to impact technical (or productive) efficiency in Sub Saharan Africa? We present different stochastic frontier models where technical efficiency is a relation between three economic variables, education, government spending, and trade openness, and three public governance variab...

The genuine problem of governance is one that pays equal attention to both incentive and knowledge issues in private and public contexts. This work brings together Austrian, Public Choice and theory of the firm insights to address such problem. By taking into account incentives and knowledge, it proposes a framework that accommodates comparisons no...

Allen, D. W., The Institutional Revolution: Measurement and the Economic Emergence of the Modern World, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2012, ISBN-10: 0226014746, pp. xiv+267, $ 30.00.

Viewing issues from the perspective of workers’ compensation, the article highlights how for some South African sectors the simultaneous provision of a minimum wage and a permanent disablement coverage increases moral hazard scope. From an economy-wide perspective this increasing scope means that employers (and society) not only pay too much to pro...

A bstract This work shows that the modular organization of voluntary open source software (OSS) production, whereby programmers supply effort of their accord, capitalizes more on division than on specialization of labor. This is so because voluntary OSS production is characterized by an organizational learning process that dominates the individual...

Leeson, P. T., The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-691-13747-6, pp. xvi+271, $24.95.

Like its predecessor – Firms, Governments and Economic Change (Yu, 2001) – this new book originates from Yu's dissatisfaction with the axiomatic optimization-and-equilibrium framework, which he sees as dominating the theory of industrial and economic organization as well as the theory and practice of business strategy. The most succinct statement o...

This paper examines the state and scope of the study of economic history of developing regions, underlining the importance of knowledge of history for economic development. While the quality of the existing research on developing countries is impressive, the proportion of published research focusing on these regions is low. The dominance of economi...

Richard Langlois, Tony Yu & Paul Robertson (LYR) (2003) have assembled a collection of previously published papers that move beyond textbook production theory. This essay discusses work by Frank Knight and Hendrik Houthakker not reproduced in LYR in relation to the capability theory of economic organization. Knight identified the problem of organiz...

Using the idea of modularity, we study the general phenomenon of open-source collaboration, which includes such things as collective invention and open science in addition to open-source software production. We argue that open-source collaboration coordinates the division of labor through the exchange of effort rather than of products: suppliers of...

The article turns to classical economic insights on the division of labor and to institutional reasoning to identify some costs and benefits of Open Source Software (OSS) and proprietary software production. It suggests that, thanks to its licenses, OSS favors market expansion more than proprietary software does by tapping into spontaneous work inp...

This article revisits the socioeconomic theory of the Austrian School economist Ludwig M. Lachmann. By showing that the common claim that Lachmann's idiosyncratic (i.e., eclectic and multidisciplinary) approach to economics entails nihilism is unfounded, it reaches the following conclusions. (1) Lachmann held a sophisticated institutional position...

We summarize Francis Fukuyama’s State Building: Governance and World Order in the Twenty-first Century (London, Profile Books, 2005)and explore the limits of its arguments. State Building is a book with a very wide scope that essentially tries to “ground” and expand the fields of political science and international relations with insights from the...

The paper revisits the socioeconomic theory of the Austrian School economist Ludwig M. Lachmann. By showing that the common claim that Lachmann’s idiosyncratic (read: eclectic and multidisciplinary) approach to economics entails nihilism is unfounded, it reaches the following conclusions. (1) Lachmann held a sophisticated institutional position to...

Without Abstract

The Second Generation Theory (SGT) of fiscal federalism, which draws upon contemporary economic and industrial organization theory, hitherto focuses only on the negative benefits of public decentralization: the potentially superior ability to align perverse incentives vis-à-vis the centralized governance alternative. The SGT neglects the positive b...

This work is a contribution to the Second Generation Theory (SGT) of fiscal federalism that studies fiscal federalism through contemporary economic and industrial organization theory. First, it establishes context by introducing the two classic motivations in support of federalism, namely, incentives and knowledge. Second, it succinctly discusses t...

The paper analyzes voluntary Free Software/Open Source Software (FS/OSS) organization of work. The empirical setting considered is the Debian GNU/Linux operating system. The paper finds that the production process is hierarchical notwithstanding the modular (nearly decomposable) architecture of software and of voluntary FS/OSS organization. But vol...

Open source software development has organizational characteristics that are out of the ordinary (e.g., flatter hierarchy, self-organization, self-regulation, and no ownership structure). The study suggests that this organization of work can be explained by combining the recently developed organizational theory of professions with the classic one o...

Foss, N.J. - Klein, P. G. (eds), 2002, Entrepreneurship and the Firm: Austrian Perspectives on Economic Organization , Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, ix+320, UK £ 69.00, hardcover, ISBN 1-84064-660-8.

Open source software development has organizational characteristics that are out of the ordinary (e.g., flatter hierarchy, self-organization, self-regulation, and no ownership structure). The study suggests that this organization of work can be explained by combining the recently developed organizational theory of professions with the classic one o...

This essay brings fiscal federalism theory into contact with the knowledge perspective to economic organization. The question addressed is: can a central government be justified in the context of fiscal federalism on grounds of economic organization? We point out that if one looks at the organizational problem of the vertical structure of the publi...

Koppl, R., 2002, Big Players and The Economic Theory of Expectations , Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England and New York, USA, Palgrave, xv+248, UK £ 50.00, hardcover, ISBN 0-333-67826-5.

Open Source Software and the Organization of Work

Tullock, G. - Seldon, A. - Brady, G. L., 2000, Government: Whose Obedient Servant? A Primer in Public Choice, «Foreword” by JAY, Sir A., «Introduction” by Seldon, A., London, The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA Readings 51), pp. v+184, £ 10.00, paperback, ISBN 0-25536482-2.

Rizzello, S., 1999, The Economics of the Mind , «Foreword” by Egidi, M., Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, Mass., USA, Edward Elgar (translated by Pasquini, E.), pp. xiv+224, US$ 80.00, hard cover, ISBN 1-84064-163-0.

Furubotn, E. G. - Richter, R., 1997, Institutions and Economic Theory: The Contribution of the New Institutional Economics, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, pp. xv+543, US$65.00, hard cover, ISBN 0-472-10817-4.

A. M. Petroni - R. Viale (ed.), Individuate e Collettivo. Decisione e Razionalità , Milano, Raffaello Cortina Editore, 1997, pp. XII - 192, L. 32.000.

The objective of this work is to run through some of the organizational characteristics of voluntary production, such as open source, the professions and scientific communities. To do so, the work considers production as division of labor rather than as production function. It finds that voluntary production exhibits: (1) the contribution of effort...