We propose a new approach which helps to shed light on the importance of the relationship between a government's welfare outcome and its citizens' desired well-being, defining a concept of "welfare gap". To determine this gap, we build two composite indices of well-being measured at the...

We investigate the relationship between money and happiness across the waves of the British Household Panel Study by using a latent class approach which accounts for slope heterogeneity, omitted variable bias and departures from normality assumptions. Our findings reveal the presence of a vast...

With an online survey on major Italian newspapers we ask respondents to simulate the typical policymaker decision, that is, the dilemma of allocating scarce financial resources among alternative competing goals using the domains of the newly defined Italian BES (sustainable and equitable...

We provide non experimental evidence of the relevance of sociability on subjective wellbeing by investigating the determinants of life satisfaction on a large sample of Europeans aged above 50. We document that voluntary work, religious attendance, helping friends/neighbours and participation to...

Obesity is a rising epidemic. This research study shows that the scale of such a phenomenon is due to the effects of peers on individual weight-related behaviour, as well as to the limits on dynamic behavior imposed by habits. We estimate a dynamic linear-in-means model to analyse the importance...

In this paper we show how trading rules can generate excess volatility in the exchange rate through repeated entry and exit of currency bears and bulls. This is something of a caricature: but it allows us to show that offcial action can have self-fulfilling effects as market composition shifts...

Forward looking agents with expectational errors provide a problem for monetary policy. We show that under such conditions a standard interest rate rule may not achieve determinacy. We suggest a modification to the standard policy rule that guarantees determinacy in this setting, which involves...

Optimal nominal interest rate rules are usually set assuming that the underlying world is linear. In this paper we consider the performance of optimal rules when the underlying relationship between inflation and the output gap may be nonlinear. In particular if the inflation-output trade off...

As major future space explorations are firmly rooted in the US government agenda, research into the macroeconomic impact of a space mission is still scarce. This paper tries to fill the existing gap by building a narrative of the aerospace structural shocks to assess their macroeconomic effects....

In this paper we investigate the effect of standard and non-standard monetary policy implemented by the ECB on income inequality in Italy. We use a novel database based on the survey micro level data on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC, Istat) in a repeated cross-section experiment which...