In Italy social enterprises include more than 7,000 institutions with around 250,000 workers serving more than three million people, a big share of which disadvantaged. Using the ICSI 2007 survey conducted by a pool of Italian universities on a representative sample of social enterprises, we...

In our empirical analysis of wage differentials in a sample of workers in the cooperative not for profit sector we find that, consistently with the donative-labor hypothesis, more intrinsically motivated workers “donate more work” (unpaid overtime, arrear holidays) but are also more...

Research on the nexus between life satisfaction and income has looked at lottery winners or postcommunism transition to document that exogenous changes in income generate effects of the same sign on happiness. In this paper we consider the unfortunate tsunami event as a negative lottery and...

The poor in developing countries are the most exposed to natural catastrophes and microfinance organizations may potentially ease their economic recovery. Yet, no evidence on MFIs strategies after natural disasters exists. We aim to fill this gap with a database which merges bank records of...

Fair trade critiques the historical inequalities inherent in international trade and seeks to promote social justice by creating alternative networks linking marginalized producers (typically in the global South) with progressive consumers (typically in the global North). The first of its kind,...

We investigate what is behind the profit/not for profit wage differential by comparing judgments on job caracteristics of workers who voluntarily or involuntarily moved from the first to the second sector. We define voluntary movers those who applied for a job in a not for profit organization...

In low income countries grass-root collective action is a well known substitute for government provision of public goods. In our research we wonder what is its effect on the law of motion of social capital, a crucial microeconomic determinant of economic development. To this purpose we structure...

Summary We evaluate the effectiveness of microfinance as a recovery tool after tsunami by testing the impact of an equity injection from foreign donors which recapitalizes a Sri Lankan MFI and allows it to refinance borrowers seriously damaged by the calamity. We find that loans obtained from...

Our paper provides some novel evidence on the burgeoning literature on life satisfaction and relative comparisons by showing that in the last 30 years comparisons with the wellbeing of top income countries have generated progressively more negative feelings on a large sample of individuals in...