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 propose a theory studying temptation in presence of both externally and internally sanctioned prohibitions. Moral values that (internally) sanction prohibited actions and their desire may increase utility by reducing self-control costs, thereby serving as partial commitment devices. We apply...

The paper focuses on the ongoing debate on non-market valuation, including the valuation environmental goods, and the opportunity to use contingent valuation for policy guidance. In fact, contingent valuation critics argue that reported willingness to pay answers do not reflect real economic...

The class of preferences over opportunity sets ("menus") rationalizable by underlying preferences over the alternatives is characterized for the general case in which the dataset is unrestricted. In particular, both the universal set of alternatives and the domain of menus over which preferences...

This paper develops a model of choice that embeds some psychological aspects affecting decision maker's behaviour. In the model, the decision maker attaches an unobservable psychological index -representing, e.g., the level of perceived availability or the level of salience- to each alternative...

We explore whether environmental motivation affects environmental behavior by focusing on volunteering. The paper first introduces a theoretical model of volunteering in environmental organizations. In a next step, it tests the hypothesis working with a large micro data set covering 32 countries...

The aim of this paper is to analyse patterns of private individual giving to Cultural Heritage institutions in Italy. Based on the emerging economic literature on pro-social behavior, we carried out a Contingent Valuation survey to assess individuals’ willingness to donate to museums and...

We present a methodology for the structural empirical analysis of household consumption and time use behaviour under marital stability. Our approach is of the revealed preference type and non-parametric, meaning that it does not require a prior functional specification of individual utilities....

This note explains the equivalence between approximate rationalizability and approximate cost-rationalizability within the context of consumer demand. In connection with these results, we interpret Afriat’s (1973) critical cost efficiency index (CCEI) as a measure of cost (in)efficiency, in...

We study how the supply of environmentalism, which is defined by psychic benefits (costs) associated with the purchase of high-environmental (low-environmental) qualities, affects the way firms choose their products and the ensuing consequences for the global level of pollution. Contrary to...