In this study we provide direct evidence on the relationship between social status and personality traits. Using survey data from the 2006-2012 waves of the HRS, we show that individuals’ self-perceived social status is associated with all the “Big Five” personality traits, after...

The analysis of many social phenomena requires to compare distributions of outcomes achieved by individuals belonging to different social groups, defined for instance by their gender, ethnicity, birthplace, education, age or parental background. When the groups are similarly distributed across...

This paper studies the link between the diffusion of news and spending decisions. We develop a canonical model that illustrates how the spread of information affects expenditures close to elections, conditional on the electoral rules. With the indirect election of the incumbent, news limits...

In this working paper we go on with the study of a mapping in Rn associated to a quadratic optimization problem with one equality linear constraint. After showing some general properties related to homogeneity and the inverse mapping, we present some results regarding how the mapping behaves...

This paper analyzes and extends the original study by Borio (2013), which includes proxies for the financial cycle in the process for estimating potential output. We extend the estimation to more countries (USA, UK, Spain, Italy, France, Austria, Netherlands and Switzerland) to check the...

We study aggregate profitability dynamics in Italy from 1995 to 2009, by stressing its regional trends. We make use of various analytic approaches, such as decompositions, analysis of the ranking of the profit rate of the various regions and of their coefficient of variation, as well as of a...

We consider a network of interacting agents and we model the process of choice on the adoption of a given innovative product by means of statistical mechanics tools. The modelization allows us to focus on the effects of direct interactions among agents in establishing the success or failure of...

Being the G-7 country with the largest shadow-economy share, we posit that Italy's manufacturing firms - to counter emerging economies' competition - could alternatively offshore or enter the shadow economy. Within this context, we investigate, in a sample of Italian firms, whether...

Should industrial policy be targeted to a few sectors or be more broad based and therefore more neutral? Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that access to foreign markets is key to answering this question. We show that in a less open economy, industrial policy should be targeted, while in a...