Rational behaviour is required for markets to function efficiently; but myopic rational behaviour could work against pro-social choice, limit creativity, and minimise the extent of cooperative action. This tension is a serious drawback of the recent promotion of markets in developing countries...

George Orwell's famous fictions, Animal Farm and Nineteen-Eighty Four were intended to advocate democratic socialism by portraying undemocratic forms of socialism as totalitarian. For Orwell, democracy was a political institution which would limit the abuse of power. But there are several...

Milton Friedman (1962) famously argued there can be no freedom of speech where the government owns the printing presses. According to Friedman, political freedom presupposes economic freedom. Less well-known are F. A. Hayek's and John Jewkes's illustrations of the same principle, both drawing...

This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

Italian Abstract: L'autore condivide alcuni ricordi sulla relazione professionale e privata tra Paolo Sylos Labini e Vito Laterza, suo commissario editore presso la casa editrice Laterza. Testo del discorso tenuto alla conferenza "Paolo Sylos Labini e la politica delle riforme", tenutasi...

We introduce machine learning in the context of central banking and policy analyses. Our aim is to give an overview broad enough to allow the reader to place machine learning within the wider range of statistical modelling and computational analyses, and provide an idea of its scope and...

This chapter discusses essential elements of an economic analysis regarding the socio-economic implications of intellectual property (IP). The aim is to help scholars from various disciplines interested in the economic reasoning behind IP for creative industries to recognize logically consistent...

An emerging economic literature over the past decade has made use of international tests of educational achievement to analyze the determinants and impacts of cognitive skills. The cross-country comparative approach provides a number of unique advantages over national studies: It can exploit...

An emerging economic literature over the past decade has made use of international tests of educational achievement to analyze the determinants and impacts of cognitive skills. The cross-country comparative approach provides a number of unique advantages over national studies: It can exploit...

An emerging economic literature over the past decade has made use of international tests of educational achievement to analyze the determinants and impacts of cognitive skills. The cross-country comparative approach provides a number of unique advantages over national studies: It can exploit...