The paper describes the evolution of the well-being of the Italians during the 150 years since the country's unification. The progress in material standard of living was substantial, with GDP per capita growing 13 times between 1861 and 2010 and hours of work (and hence effort) falling...

The increase in dispersion of personal earnings in the USA has received considerable attention and has been analyzed extensively. The evidence for other countries is less systematic. There are a few comparative studies, but they tend to focus on descriptions of the overall distribution of income...

We compare different indicators of the spread and consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, developing a novel method to adjust daily COVID-19 deaths to match weekly excess mortality. Focusing on Sweden, the only country that has good data and did not impose a lockdown, we construct counterfactuals...

This paper looks at the relationship between the institutional design of the social security system and retirement from the labour force in three countries: Italy, Spain and the USA. Our works stresses the importance of dynamic incentives embedded in social security systems throughout the world...