The idea of measuring scientific relevance by counting citations is gaining ever-growing consensus among economists, and thanks to the electronic bibliographic resources now available the procedure has become relatively simple and fast. However, when it comes to putting the idea into practice...

According to Sraffian economists, both the aggregate and the general equilibrium versions of the neoclassical theory suffer from a logical inconsistence that prevents them from identifying a long-period position. The aim of this paper is to show that also Sraffa's approach, based on the...

Escalation is a key characteristic of many consumption behaviors that has not received the theoretical attention it deserves. The aim of this paper is to propose both a definition and a theoretical treatment of escalation in consumption. We shall define escalation as the attempt to obtain...

The aim of this paper is to discuss possible solutions to the “third wave” of technological unemployment and their main drawbacks. The process has just started and will only be fully realized in the future, but its main novelty is already well known and concerns robots (and artificial...

The market for pornography is of great economic relevance but has been totally ignored in economic investigation. The present paper focuses on the demand side of this market, with the main aim of proposing a preliminary theoretical assessment of the behavior of pornography purchasers. In this...

This paper has two main goals. The first is to provide empirical evidence that differences in labour market institutions across countries and, specifically, in how they provide protection to workers, can be attributed to underlying differences in culturally-based prior beliefs: in particular,...

This paper has two major goals. The first is to propose an evaluation of the economic weight of the sexual recreation industry in Italy. To achieve this goal data from different sources have been collected, and in some cases estimated when studies on specific topics were not available. The...

This paper has two main goals. The first is to show that behavioral rather than maximizing principles emerge from textual analysis as the microeconomic foundations for Keynes’s Consumption Theory; the second goal is to demonstrate the possibility of grounding a Keynesian-type aggregate...

This brief paper seeks to overcome a number of methodological disagreements among economists who use the long-period method of analysis. In particular, it attempts to clarify the key distinctions between convergence and stability, convergence and gravitation and chronological and theoretical...

The empirical evidence that unemployment is one of the most negative outcomes in life, carrying non-pecuniary psychic costs as well as pecuniary ones, is strong. Yet, standard explanations of the demand for social protection have neglected these costs and their impact on the way in which workers...