In this paper we estimate the relationship between urban sprawl and a measure of air quality, namely the number of days in which the PM10 concentration exceeds safeguard limits in European Union cities. Building on a multidimensional representation of sprawl, the paper employs several indicators...

Policies and explicit incentives designed for self-regarding individuals sometimes are less effective or even counterproductive when they diminish altruism, ethical norms and other social preferences. Evidence from 51 experimental studies indicates that this crowding out effect is pervasive, and...

We present new evidence on the influence of income inequality on generalized trust. Using individual panel data from Swedish counties together with an instrumental variable strategy we find that differences in disposable income, and especially differences among people in the bottom half of the...

We conduct an extensive robustness analysis of the relationship between trust and growth for a later time period (the 1990s) and with a bigger sample (63 countries) than previous studies. In addition to robustness tests that focus on model uncertainty, we use Least Trimmed Squares, a robust...

We present new evidence on how generalized trust is formed. Unlike previous studies, we look at the explanatory power of economic institutions, we use newer data, we incorporate more countries, and we use instrumental variables to handle the causality problem. A central result is that legal...

Italy makes for a very interesting case study of the impact of social variables on economic performance. Across its provinces, differences in social and cultural attitudes seem associated to large differences in economic development. We analyze the importance of some social variables on...

The first aim of this paper is to clarify the differences and rela-tionships between cumulative advantage/disadvantage and the Matthew ef-fect. Its second aim, which is also its main contribution, is not only to present a new measure of the Matthew effect, but also to show how to esti-mate this...

We survey the empirical literature in economics on the impact of media technologies on social capital. Motivated by a simple model of information and collective action, we cover a range of different outcomes related to social capital, from social and political participation to interpersonal...

Stakeholder oriented governance systems are often thought to hamper efficiency. We show that social capital improves the viability of stakeholder-oriented firms in competitive markets. Studying exits from the population of Norwegian savings banks after deregulations, we find that banks located...

The essay deals with the issue of urban circularity understood as a subset of the Circular Economy paradigm, highlighting potential and limits of an emerging new model spreading on a global scale. The critical reasoning starts from a very recent production of institutional documents and the...