This paper develops a standard matching model to address the problem of the hidden sector (including non-registered firms but producing for legal markets), as it is characterised in Italy, i.e. framed in a rather advanced economic and institutional setting, but also linked to the socio-economic...

This paper explores life satisfaction in Italy by using the ISAE survey on Italian households’ budget, which has been extended to the specific question on this aspect in the May 2008 wave. Our main new contributions to the existing literature regard the role of the characterisation of the...

During the most recent decades people in industrialised countries have reported both a stagnant or even declining subjective well-being, as Easterlin (1974) originally observed, and deterioration in their social and family bonds, as Putnam (2000) has claimed. The paper proposes an integrated...

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...

The recent debate on happiness in economics has revived interest in Scitovsky’s 1976 book The Joyless Economy, which aims at explaining the income-happiness paradox, i.e. "why [American] unprecedented and fast-growing prosperity had left its beneficiaries unsatisfied." A dynamic economic model...

The paper investigates the relation between social capital and life satisfaction focusing on the distinction between bonding and bridging as introduced by Putnam (2000). Using the latest version of the combined World and European Values Surveys, we first address the question of measurement of...

This paper incorporates tax morale into a search and matching model of equilibrium unemployment, with on-the-job search, extended to both the irregular sector and entrepreneurship. Tax morale is modelled as a social norm for tax compliance which renders evasion costly. The moral cost of tax...