We model in an endogenous growth set-up the hypotheses that the expansion of market activities weakens social capital formation, and that firms can invest in formal mechanisms of control and enforcement to substitute for social capital (trust, work ethics, honesty). The model shows that the...

We present a simple growth model which has two original features: the strategic context considered, which is an evolutionary game, and the growth mechanism described, in which growth is caused by negative externalities. The emphasis in this growth mechanism is evidently different from that...

The formidable economic growth of China in the past few decades led to outstanding improvements in virtually all objective indicators of standards of life. However, these objective records are in striking contrast with subjective ones. Between 1990 and 2007, Chinese average subjective well-being...

While the various streams of environmentalism agree in claiming that the current patterns of economic activity are unsustainable for natural resources, they disagree in answering the following question: who is the responsible? Two different answers have been provided: the people or the...

Economic growth and unemployment exhibit an ambiguous relationship – according to empirical studies. This ambiguity can be investigated by observing the role of the underground economy in shaping the productivity of firms. Indeed, unemployment may be absorbed by underground firms, which adopt...

This paper develops a labour market matching model in order to address the problem of the persistence of the hidden sector and of its regional concentration, as in Italy and in the enlarged Europe. The main novel features of the model are that entrepreneurial ability affects job productivity,...

A matching model will explain both unemployment and economic growth by considering the underground sector. Three problems can thus be simultaneously accounted for: (i) the persistence of underground economy, (ii) the ambiguous relationships between underground employment and unemployment, and...