This paper addresses two hot topics of the contemporary debate, social capital and economic growth. Our theoretical analysis sheds light on decisive but so far neglected issues: how does social capital accumulate over time? Which is the relationship between social capital, technical progress and...

This paper provides an introduction to the concept of social capital, and carries out a critical review of the empirical literature on social capital and economic development. The survey points out six main weaknesses affecting the empirics of social capital. Identified weaknesses are then used...

We characterize how the size distribution of plants, within narrowly defined industries, changed in Italy over a ten-year time span, and relate this to the stock of civic capital at the provincial level. Data on plant size come from the 1991 and 2001 Italian censuses. Civic capital turns out to...

Inequity aversion models have been used to explain equitable payoff divisions in bargaining games. I show that inequity aversion can actually increase the asymmetry of payoff division if unanimity is not required. This is due to the analogy between inequity aversion and risk aversion. Inequity...

The external influence of scholarly activity has to date been measured primarily in terms of publications and citations, metrics that also dominate the promotion and grant processes. Yet the array of scholarly activities visible to the outside world are far more extensive and recently developed...

China is appraised to have the world's largest exploitable reserves of shale gas, although several legal, regulatory, environmental and investment-related issues will likely restrain its scope. China's capacity to successfully face these hurdles and produce commercial shale gas will have a...

This article purports to trace the origin of money on the basis of factors in interpersonal relationships, affecting a sustainable development and public happiness, namely trust, reciprocity and the concept of we-rationality. Both the historical approach and the one based on traditional economic...

We consider one-to-one matching problems under two modalities of uncertainty that differ in the way types are assigned to agents. Individuals have preferences over the possible types of the agents from the opposite market side and initially know the “name” but not the ”type” of the other...

This paper studies many-to-one matching market in which each agent’s preferences not only depend on the institution that hires her, but also on the group of her colleagues, which are matched to the same institution. With an unrestricted domain of preferences the non-emptiness of the core is...

This paper analyses the contribution to the creation of a culturally diverse Sydney landscape by ethnic communities following the arrival of over a million and half non-English speaking settlers since 1948. Through fragmented collective actions, around 450 communal places were established to...