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...

In this paper, we investigate the macroeconomic response to exogenous shocks, namely natural disasters and stochastic productivity shocks. To do so, we make use of an endogenous business cycle model in which cyclical behavior arises from the investment–profit instability; the amplitude of this...

We develop an endogenous growth model with capital, labor and energy as production factors and three productivity variables that measure accumulated innovations for energy production, energy savings, and neutral growth. All markets are complete and perfect, except for research, for which we...

We study the interactions between technological innovation, investment in human capital and child labor. In our setting new technologies require new skills and new skills can be developed only through schooling. In a two-stage game, first firms decide on innovation, then households decide on...

In the last fifteen years, income differences among European Member States have been strongly narrowing while the process has been matched with a widening of the inter-regional variance within single countries. Traditionally, regional economic disparities in Europe have been ascribed to...

A suitable strategy for achieving sustainable development is to foster environmental innovations. Environmental innovations, however, suffer from so-called "double externalities", because apart from innovation spillovers they also improve the quality of public environmental goods, which can be...

We develop an economic partial equilibrium model for energy supply and demand with capital and labor as production factors, and endogenous technological change through learning by research and learning by doing. Our model reproduces the learning curve typical for (bottom-up) energy system...

Environmental policy instruments have an impact on the incentives to invest in environmental R&D and this link should deserve careful consideration when introducing new instruments. Some authors argue that environmental taxes and tradable permits have rather comparable impacts on environmental...

The study of innovation and technological change is an increasing field of economic enquire because innovation can be considered a major engine of growth. This paper is concerned with the determinants of innovation and technological change. Different theoretical approaches present in the...

We develop a partial one-sector model with capital, natural resources, and labor as production factors, and endogenous technological change through research. Production exhibits increasing returns to scale. We compare the response of output and resource use to a change in resource prices with...