This paper investigates the role played by social interactions in explaining the effects of macroeconomic conditions on well-being. Using survey data for a representative sample of Italian individuals, we find that social interactions play a dual role as both moderators and mediators of the...

This paper provides an assessment of quality of life in Italian cities using the hedonic approach. We analyze micro-level data for housing and labor markets to estimate compensating differentials for local amenities within five domains: climate, environment, services, society and economy. The...

This paper presents an application of the hedonic approach to measure the monetary price of social relations. We use individual-level data for housing and labor markets in 103 Italian cities to estimate the price of relational amenities and construct monetary indexes of quality of relational...

This paper investigates the role played by the cultural norms of particularism and universalism for collusive bribery. In our theoretical framework, the act of proposing or demanding a bribe violates a commonly held social norm, thus producing a psychological cost. By lowering this psychological...

This paper investigates the role played by the smartphone for the quality of social interactions and subjective well-being. We argue that the intrusiveness of the smartphone reduces the quality of face-to-face interactions and their positive impact on well-being. We test this hypothesis in a...

This paper presents firm level evidence on the dynamics of non-manual wage premia and employment shares in Italian manufacturing during the nineties. We find that the relative stability of aggregate wage premia and employment shares hides offsetting disaggregate forces. First, while technical...

This paper presents firm-level evidence on the dynamics of the relative demand for non-manual workers in Italian manufacturing during the 1990s. The analysis provides a number of interesting results. First, the rise within firms in the share of non manual workers in both employment and hours...

This paper investigates opinion dynamics and social influence in directed communication networks. We study the theoretical properties of a boundedly rational model of opinion formation in which individuals aggregate the information they receive from their neighbors by using weights that are a...