We use novel and unique survey data from Italy to shed light on key questions regarding the measurement of social capital and the use of social capital indicators for empirical work. Our data cover a sample of over 600,000 respondents interviewed between 2000 and 2015. We identify four distinct...

Economics instructors who start their courses with abstract concepts, definitions, charts, and astronomical numbers often miss the invaluable first-impression opportunity. This paper addresses the lack of appropriate gateway-transitional-interdisciplinary concepts in introductory economics...

We consider abstract social systems of private property, made of n individuals endowed with non-paternalistic interdependent preferences, who interact through exchanges on competitive markets and Pareto-efficient lumpsum transfers. The transfers follow from a distributive liberal social contract...

Within the context of the New Economic Sociology, Karl Polanyi is almost universally considered the “father” of the concept of embeddedness. However, this concept has been subject to selective appropriation by this discipline and its relationship to the remaining theoretical edifice...

The Great Recession and the financial crisis of 2007-09 prompted ca lls for fundamental reforms of economic theory. The role of theory in economics and in recent economic events is considered in light of two recen t books: the sociologist Richard Swedberg's The Art of Social Theory and the...

A transcription of a 2019 conversation with Duke historian E. Roy Weintraub on his intellectual development over the 1980s from mathematician to economist to historian. The conversation also explored Weintraub's early and continuing attempts to forge new ways to study the history of contemporary...

The Great Recession and the financial crisis of 2007-09 prompted calls for fundamental reforms of economic theory. The role of theory in economics and in recent economic events is considered in light of two recent books: the sociologist Richard Swedberg's "The Art of Social Theory" and the...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the way in which the world is divided into different 'legal traditions', in order to understand the actual establishment of a ranking of the various legal systems, as it is used as a powerful device for global governance, directed to mould policy projects of...

The Great Recession and the financial crisis of 2007-09 prompted ca lls for fundamental reforms of economic theory. The role of theory in economics and in recent economic events is considered in light of two recen t books: the sociologist Richard Swedberg's The Art of Social Theory and the...