In the centennial of the March on Rome, this paper contributes to the political economy of Italian Fascism by addressing in quantitative terms the fortunes of Italian economic elites during the interwar period. Macro-economic indicators indicate capital accumulation and high profits, in a period...

In the light of the recent literature on the intellectual history of inequality, this paper offers the first survey and a tentative classification of the Italian literature addressing issues related to social mobility, from late-19th century to the 'Economic Miracle' of the 1950s. During these...

In summer 1923, pursuant to the 'full powers' granted him by the Parliament to balance the budget, Alberto De Stefani - appointed in October 1922 as Mussolini's Treasury Minister - announced the abolition of inheritance tax. The most iconic act of Fascist 'financial restauration' of 1922-25, the...

This paper documents the ongoing construction of the Italian Historical Taxpayers' Database (IHTD), currently consisting of 1,593,563 micro-records of income declarations filed by Italian autonomous workers in 1889, 1922 and 1933. Such a database results from the digitisation of a so far...

We argue against the use of composite indices, such as the Human Development Index (HDI), in economic history. We show that the HDI can be interpreted as a formal representation of the analyst’s ethical system. We support our claim by introducing a new class of paternalistic social welfare...