The aim of this research is to provide a long run estimate of the Human Development Index (HDI) for Italy. To this purpose we have reconstructed Italian historical series relative to life expectancy, literacy rate, school enrolment rates and income. All the series presented are the result of a...

Love, War and Culture have all played an important role in the evolution of human institutions and they have been characterized by complex relationships. War can select unselfish groups ready to sacrifice themselves for the love of their communities that they recognize to be culturally different...

this paper combines the economic concept of specific investment with anthropological evidence on three early human societies –the disbanding groups of pre-anatomically modern humans, the huntergatherers’ egalitarian communities, and the primitive states or chiefdoms. This combination is...

Recently the quality of Higher Education (HE) system and its evaluation have been key issues of the political and scientific debate on education policies all over Europe. In the wide landscape that involves the entire HE system we draw attention on the third level of its organization, i.e. the...

Negli ultimi vent’anni i paesi europei hanno introdotto numerose riforme economiche orientate a rendere le istituzioni economiche più “favorevoli ai mercati”, nella convinzione che l’ambiente regolativo costituisca un fondamentale fattore di crescita economica. La prima parte di questo...

In this paper we outline the economic rationale behind the virtual strike, and workers’ incentives to use this bargaining solution rather than resorting to standard strike action. We show that, from a welfare perspective, a virtual strike always dominates a standard strike and it would be most...

Taking value as the socio-economic analogue of biological or cultural fitness, in this paper I start a study of the interaction between individual-level and group-level explanatory mechanisms by looking for what kind of intra-group relationships obtains given the nature of inter-group...

This paper introduces a notion of exploitation according to which participants in a cooperative production process are exploited to the extent that their earnings coincide with what they would earn from independent participation in the production process. This notion is then used to show that,...

We consider the exercise of power in competitive markets for goods, labour and credit. We offer a definition of power and show that if contracts are incomplete it may be exercised either in Pareto-improving ways or to the disadvantage of those without power. Contrasting conceptions of power...

Starting from the observation that surplus-value is almost always due to the collective undertaking of non additively separable human capital investments, this paper introduces a theory of the institutional structure of production where groups are taken as units of analysis in a multi-level...