Geography and the quality of the environment may have long lasting effects on the living standards of individuals and this, in its turn, may affect even substantially the distribution of income and regional disparities. In this paper I consider malaria as a measure of "bad geography" and propose...

The aim of this paper is to present an alternative methodology for discounting far distant future externalities genereted by an investment project: time-declining discount rates. First I present the experimental evidence on individuals' time-inconsistency. Second I consider the theoretical...

[fre] Résumé . Dans les sociétés européennes des siècles passés, les relations de parrainage et de compérage, qui étaient tissées sous une forme de parenté particulière (la « parenté spirituelle »), jouaient un rôle social important. Bien qu'il ait des spécificités importantes,...

Long-term developments in economic inequality are attracting growing attention. Earlier works focused on producing reliable measures of inequality, which overall suggest that in Europe, inequality levels were already high in preindustrial times and tended to grow almost continuously from the...

No general consensus has been reached, as yet, on how to interpret sixteenth century Italian demographic dynamics. Such divergences reflect different convictions about the relationship between population and resources. On the base of 164 series of baptisms celebrated in northern Italian parishes...

This article compares the impact of plague across Europe during the seventeenth century. It shows that the disease affected southern Europe much more severely than the north. Italy was by far the area worst struck. Using a new database, the article introduces an epidemiological variable that has...