Despite its relevance in 19th-century economics, wealth -its accumulation, composition, and distribution- has largely been neglected in Italian economic history. Filling this gap, we show that between the late 19th and mid-20th centuries, Italy presented a historically high value of total...

In summer 1923, pursuant to the 'full powers' granted him by the Parliament to balance the budget, Alberto De Stefani - appointed in October 1922 as Mussolini's Treasury Minister - announced the abolition of inheritance tax. The most iconic act of Fascist 'financial restauration' of 1922-25, the...

In the light of the recent literature on the intellectual history of inequality, this paper offers the first survey and a tentative classification of the Italian literature addressing issues related to social mobility, from late-19th century to the 'Economic Miracle' of the 1950s. During these...

We build an agent-based model to study how the interplay between low- and high- frequency trading affects asset price dynamics. Our main goal is to investigate whether high-frequency trading exacerbates market volatility and generates flash crashes. In the model, low-frequency agents adopt...

In this paper we explore the effects of alternative combinations of fiscal and monetary policies under different income distribution regimes. In particular, we aim at evaluating fiscal rules in economies subject to banking crises and deep recessions. We do so using an agent-based model populated...

This paper presents the family of the Keynes+Schumpeter (K+S, cf. Dosi et al, 2010, 2013, 2014) evolutionary agent-based models, which study the effects of a rich ensemble of innovation, industrial dynamics and macroeconomic policies on the long-term growth and short-run fluctuations of the...

In this work we analyze the short- and long-run effects of fiscal austerity policies, employing an agent-based model populated by heterogeneous, boundedly-rational firms and banks. The model, in line with the family of "Keynes+Schumpeter" formalism, is able to account for a wide array of macro...

Simulated models suffer intrinsically from validation and comparison problems. The choice of a suitable indicator quantifying the distance between the model and the data is pivotal to model selection. However, how to validate and discriminate between alternative models is still an open problem...

Evolutionary theories of economic change identify the processes of idiosyncratic learning by individual firms and of market selection as the two main drivers of the dynamics of industries. Are such processes able to robustly account for the statistical regularities which industrial structures...

Selection procedures for new recruits in research organizations, supposedly aiming at identifying the candidates with the highest potential, relies necessarily on indirect information concerning the quality of a researcher. It is safe to assume that this information is correlated to, but not...