This paper addresses two hot topics of the contemporary debate, social capital and economic growth. Our theoretical analysis sheds light on decisive but so far neglected issues: how does social capital accumulate over time? Which is the relationship between social capital, technical progress and...

We characterize how the size distribution of plants, within narrowly defined industries, changed in Italy over a ten-year time span, and relate this to the stock of civic capital at the provincial level. Data on plant size come from the 1991 and 2001 Italian censuses. Civic capital turns out to...

This article purports to trace the origin of money on the basis of factors in interpersonal relationships, affecting a sustainable development and public happiness, namely trust, reciprocity and the concept of we-rationality. Both the historical approach and the one based on traditional economic...

The external influence of scholarly activity has to date been measured primarily in terms of publications and citations, metrics that also dominate the promotion and grant processes. Yet the array of scholarly activities visible to the outside world are far more extensive and recently developed...

China is appraised to have the world's largest exploitable reserves of shale gas, although several legal, regulatory, environmental and investment-related issues will likely restrain its scope. China's capacity to successfully face these hurdles and produce commercial shale gas will have a...

Despite the potential importance of awards as a possible career catalyst, the theoretical and empirical research on awards is still in its infancy. Here, we address this notable shortcoming in the economic literature by exploring data from German youth football. Analyzing whether an early career...

What is the long-term effect of organised crime presence on social capital accumulation? By leveraging novel social capital and organised crime data, this study investigates this question within the Italian landscape. In an instrumental variable (IV) setting, we exploit the forced resettlement...

Welfare ranking of policy instruments is addressed in a two-sector Ramsey model with monopoly pricing in one sector as the only distortion. When government spending is restricted, i.e. when a government is unable or unwilling to finance the required costs for implementing the optimum policy,...

Liberalisation and technological developments have led to the fragmentation of production and the emergence of the concept of global value chains. This has ushered in the role of services for linking the production network, resulting in a greater composition of services in the value of tradable....

After decades using monetary aggregates as the main instrument of monetary policy and having different varieties of crawling peg exchange rate regimes, Colombia adopted a full-fledged inflation-targeting (IT) regime in 1999, with inflation as the nominal anchor, a floating exchange rate, and the...