This article compares the impact of plague across Europe during the seventeenth century. It shows that, contrary to received wisdom, seventeenth century plague cannot be considered a “great equalizer”: the disease affected southern Europe much more severely than the north. In particular,...

This article analyzes social norms regulating selection of godparents in Italy and France and how they will be affected by demographic change. On the grounds of Vatican statistics and of the World Values Survey, it demonstrates that baptisms still occur for the vast majority of children in...

This research note presents and compares some first findings obtained by the project EINITE-Economic Inequality across Italy and Europe, 1300-1800. The main aim of the project is to investigate long-term trends in economic inequality in Italy and in Europe. Here we compare previously published...

This paper provides an overview of economic inequality in the Florentine State (Tuscany) from the late fourteenth to the late eighteenth century. Regional studies of this kind are rare, and this is only the second-ever attempt at covering such a long period. Consistent with recent research...

During the demographic transition that in Europe tended to take place from the early 19th to the end of the 20th century, the population in European countries and its overseas offshoots increased by a factor of five or less, which is low compared to the increase now taking place in most other...

Following the seminal work by Bullard and Sebald [Effects of Parametric Uncertainty and Technological Change on In put-Out put Models, Rev. of Ec. And Stat., vol. 59,75-81], in this paper we present an innovative approach to sensitivity analysis in Input-Out put model. In particular, we propose...

The choice of an appropriate social rate of discount is critical in the decision-making process on public investments. In this paper we review concisely the literature on social discounting and refer explicitly to a recently growing field of related research, that is, individual time preference....

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...