This paper surveys alternative approaches to the emergence and evolution of institutions. The challenge is to develop frameworks capable of capturing both stability and change. We follow a “descaling” approach to show how founding assumptions about economics—namely, alternative assumptions...

The paper addresses the issue of rethinking the welfare state as a part of a broader national system of social protection (NSSP) and a mode of societal regulation. In order to overcome the theoretical limits of bottom-up comparative analysis of welfare states, one builds a structural model of...

In the last forty years, the theory of financial markets has become a growing field of interest for academics as well as for practitioners. We present here an overview of the main topics.

In this paper we extend the theory of precautionary saving to the case in which uncertainty is multidimensional and we develop a matrix-measure of multivariate prudence. Furthermore, we characterize comparative prudence, decreasing and increasing prudence, the effect of uncertainty on the...

In this paper, a novel approach is implemented to quantify the effects on poverty and inequality of the financial crisis that hit Indonesia in 1997. It relies on the combination of a microsimulation model and a standard CGE model. These two models are used in a sequential fashion in order to...

This article documents the conditional and unconditional distributions of the realized volatility for the 2008 futures contract in the European climate exchange (ECX), which is valid under the EU emissions trading scheme (EU ETS). Realized volatility measures from naive, kernel-based and...