The reaction of energy demand to price changes is a key policy issue as it describes the economy's reaction to changes in market conditions or to policy interventions. The issue is even more important for the Italian economy, highly exposed to energy price changes, given its almost complete...

The paper analyzes the case of Belgium to provide insight into the relationships among ethnic heterogeneity, voting participation and local economic growth. We find that heterogeneity, and external and internal mobility reduce immigrants’ voting participation, while we do not find support for...

This paper analyses the role of individual subjective wellbeing (SWB) in conjunction with personality traits (PTs) in childbearing behavior. We use the German Socio Economic Panel to estimate the way satisfaction matters for having a child. We find that SWB positively predicts childbearing, with...

The performance gap in math of immigrant students is investigated using PISA 2012. The gap with respect to non-immigrant schoolmates is first measured. The hypothesis that first (second) generation students coming from (whose parents come from) countries with a higher performance in math fare...

The possible implications of using the family as opposed to the individual as the unit of taxation are not clear. This applies both to work incentives and distributional outcomes. In this paper we evaluate the effects of a hypothetical reform for Italian income taxation with respect to labour...

The so called “socio-technical transitions” is driven by actors such as firms and industries, policy makers and politicians, consumers, civil society, engineers and researchers. This paper addresses the role of consumers in the transition process and their interaction with the established...

We develop a model of persuasion where, consistent with the psychological literature on dual process theory, the persuadee has to sustain a cognitive effort - the elaboration cost - in order to fully and precisely elaborate information. The persuader makes an offer to the persuadee and, aware...

Latin American countries experienced important changes over the last decade. The implementation of fiscal reforms, public debt reduction and the high level of accumulated reserves gave them more policy space than in the past. As a result, Latin American countries were able to implement...

Without the passions there would be little reason to act at all. Nevertheless, in standard economic models human action is driven solely by self-interest: the passions are supposed to interfere with our ability to form rational beliefs and to make rational choices. In fact, any action originated...

Real markets can be naturally represented as networks, and they share with other social networks the fundamental property of sparsity, whereby agents are connected by l = O (n) relationships. The exponential networks model introduced by Park and Newman can be extended in order to deal with this...