The study discusses myths of entrepreneurship by looking at the overlapping areas of entrepreneurship, self-employment and professions. The study argues that professions are part of the category of self-employment. Additionally, the study presents empirical findings drawn from a unique empirical...

This paper addresses the gender pay gap among Italian university graduates on entry to the labour market and stresses the importance of gender stereotypes on subjective assessment of individual productivity. Our data show that in contexts where the stereotype is most likely to occur, the...

This paper uses a dataset built by the author on the basis of raw data taken from different national surveys to carry 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...

The paper deals with margins of entrepreneurship where small business owners are almost working on their own having no or just a few employees and where one can find also people working with low returns and having firms without stability or prosperous dynamics. However, even the area of...

This paper discusses the endeavours of policy makers to come to some degree of wage coordination among EU countries, aiming at aligning wage growth with labour productivity growth at the national levels. In this context, we analyse the wage and productivity developments in Germany, the European...

The welfare state was created after 1950 with counterproductive mechanisms and this caused high inflation and high unemployment and stagnating growth by 1970, called stagflation. Since 1970 governments redressed the welfare state but did not succeed in finding workable mechanisms. They rather...

The paper proposes a method to speed up the transition toward the notional contributions pension system in Italy. It seems the most appropriate manner to combine and pursue employment and financial sustainability goals. The method computes percentages for abating the old retributive pensions...

It is not clear, whether changes in self-employment are primarily driven by the necessity to take part in the labour market, or if those activities reflect new modes of labour market integration revealing new opportunities and markets, which are especially due in wide parts to the service and...

There is a surprising gap in the economic literature on social capital. First, we lack studies addressing the effects of social capital on those facets of development that can contribute in making growth more sustainable in the long run, like, for example, human development and social cohesion....