We provide an account of the non profit enterprise based on the motivations of the agents involved. Our main idea is that these are ex -post motivated by both self-interest and a conditional willingness to conform to their ex ante accepted constitutional ideology, which are weighed up in a...

The contrasting effects of labour market rigidity on efficiency are investigated in a model where technological change is non-general purpose and different types of skills are available to workers. Ex ante efficiency calls for high labour market rigidity, as this favours workers’ acquisition...

The social capital literature attributes association members a key role in propagating inter-personal trust in the society. It has been posited that participating in associations instils pro-social attitudes in their members, and that the decline in associational membership is the main cause of...

We investigate the effect of beliefs and preferences on trust and trustworthiness in the first experiment involving a stratified sample of association members and a demographically comparable sample of non-members. We show that: (1) Neither expectations on others’ behaviour nor risk aversion...

This paper provides a description and background information related to the experimental project on “Trust and trustworthiness in association members and in the society”. The main purpose of the project has been to test experimentally one of the main theses of the social capital literature,...

We partition post-Soviet Union Transition Economies into two groups: European Union New Member States and countries belonging to the Commonwealth of Independent States or the South Eastern Europe area. Both groups started the 1980s with low levels of inequality, but in the early 2000s the latter...

Many scholars have stressed the importance of membership in associations as one of the main determinants of inter-personal trust (e.g. Zucker, 1986; Coleman, 1990; Lahno, 1995). In particular, Olson (1982) and Putnam et al. (1993) provided two different accounts of the role of private voluntary...

This book is a welcome consolidation and extension of the recent expanding debates on happiness and economics. Happiness and economics, as a new field for research, is now of pivotal interest particularly to welfare economists and psychologists. This Handbook provides an unprecedented forum for...

I develop a model of growth based on three assumptions: first, a variety of technologies characterised by different degrees of labour skill intensity, where technological change is localized; second, agents are boundedly rational, and the aggregate rule of motion of their behaviour follows a...