Our societies are heterogeneous in many dimensions such as census, education, religion, ethnic and cultural composition. The links between individuals - e.g. by friendship, marriage or collaboration - are not evenly distributed, but rather tend to be concentrated within the same group. This...

Three-quarters of the world’s AIDS population lives in Sub-Saharan Africa; most have no access to lifesaving drugs, testing facilities or even basic preventative health care. One of the major factors inhibiting medical professionals in Africa from treating this disease is the inability to access...

This paper considers the estimation of binary choice panel data models with discrete endogenous regressors. We present a switching probit model which accounts for selectivity bias as well as for other forms of time invariant unobserved heterogeneity. Individual effects are allowed to be...

This paper carries out an investigation into the socio-economic determinants of couples’ childbearing decisions in Italy. Since having children is in most cases a “couple matter”, the analysis accounts for the characteristics of both the possible parents. Our results do not support...

How does future income uncertainty affect child labour and human capital accumulation? Using a unique panel dataset, we examine the effect of changes in climate variability on the allocation of time among child labour activities (the intensive margin) as well as participation in education and...

This paper analyses the issue of money superneutrality through an intertemporal optimising model of capital accumulation and inflation with endogenous fertility, i.e. endogenous population growth. The model establishes an inverse relation between capital-labour ratio and population growth, which...

The U.S. system of security law was designed more than 70 years ago to regain investors’ trust after a major financial crisis. Today we face a similar problem. But while in the 1930s the prevailing perception was that investors had been defrauded by offerings of dubious quality securities, in...

This paper proposes to investigate the impact of financialization on energy markets (oil, gas, coal and electricity European forward prices) during both normal times and extreme fluctuation periods through an original behavioral and emotional approach. To this aim, we propose a new theoretical...

The paper clarifies the link between changes in risk aversion and the effect on the consumption discount rate. In a general framework that can cope with various forms of uncertainty, it is shown that the response of the consumption discount rate to a change in risk aversion depends on some...

The potential of geoengineering as an alternative or complementary option to mitigation and adaptation has received increased interest in recent years. The scientific assessment of geoengineering is driven to a large extent by assumptions about its effectiveness, costs, and impacts, all of which...