This paper presents the first empirical assessment of the causal relationship between social capital and health in Italy. The analysis draws on the 2000 wave of the Multipurpose Survey on Household conducted by the Italian Institute of Statistics on a representative sample of the population (n =...

This paper presents the first empirical assessment of the causal relationship between social capital and health in Italy. The analysis draws on the 2000 wave of the Multipurpose Survey on Household conducted by the Italian Institute of Statistics on a representative sample of the population (n =...

The objective of this paper is to theoretically analyze how human interaction may evolve in a world characterized by the explosion of online networking and other Web-mediated ways of building and nurturing relationships. The analysis shows that online networking yields a storage mechanism...

This paper carries out a preliminary and exploratory investigation into the effect of various types of social interaction on health in Italy. After controlling for household income, education, work status and a number of socio-demographic variables, we find that the frequency of meetings with...

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....

Questo paper presenta un questionario e una guida pratica per la misurazione del capitale sociale. Il lavoro vuole costituire un vero e proprio manuale rivolto a ricercatori, studenti e docenti, consulenti di impresa e operatori del terzo settore che per qualsiasi ragione, dalla redazione della...

There is wide consensus that entrepreneurial talent is the ability to discover and exploit market opportunities by taking the relevant risky decisions. Discovery and exploitation are separate but interlinked features of entrepreneurship requiring, in different proportions, the exploitation of...

The main question of this paper is: what type of social capital is able to mitigate labour precariousness and to foster human development? This issue has been addressed through a review of the literature and an empirical investigation on the Italian regions. The analysis shows that only bonding...

We develop a dynamic model to analyze the sources and the evolution of social participation and social capital in a growing economy characterized by exogenous technical progress. Starting from the assumption that the well-being of agents basically depends on material and relational goods, we...

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...