While we do not mean to imply that there are insurmountable or even clear distinctions between the social sciences, we claim that economists can still provide an original analysis of class, which should be regarded as complementary to those developed by sociologists. Following the tradition of...

Recent economic literature on poverty may be broadly divided into two strands. One strand investigates the multidimensional nature of poverty. The other strand, employing the large availability of household surveys, investigates the micro and macro determinants of monetary poverty, analyzing the...

Microfinance promise to serve low-income or disadvantaged beneficiaries excluded from the formal banking sector in a financially sustainable way (thus to achieve the so called “double bottom line” of financial and social performance) built excitement around the development of a global...

The aim of this paper is to offer a contribution to the analysis of the under-representation of women economists in academic positions in Italy, focusing on publications. In Italy women’s proportion of PhDs in Economics and Statistics has increased from 39 to 52 per cent in the last decade....

Microfinance industry has grown massively in the past decades. Even if it is commonly considered as an importantdevelopment tool, the evidence of the socio-economic impact of microfinance is mixed, regardless of what methodology hasbeen applied. The purpose of this study is to assess the...

Ageing is a distinctly gendered phenomenon, women being increasingly represented in the older cohorts of the European population, due to their longer life expectancy than men. Furthermore, gender differences and inequalities are a fundamental feature of social exclusion and poverty in old age....

This paper aims to analyse Italian MFIs social performance according to the core set of common indicators and framework developed by the Social Performance Task Force using data collected by Fondazione Giordano Dell’Amore and Fondazione Risorsa Donna in 2008 for the European Microfinance...