Numerous contributions in the last decades are based on similar inspiratory principles, which, at least if considered altogether, are highly innovative with respect to the existing tradition in economics. This paper is a perspective and speculative guess aiming at identifying the gist of this...

Most popular explanations of the happiness paradox cannot fully account for the lack of growth in U.S. reported well-being during the last thirty years (Blanchflower and Oswald (2004)). In this paper we test an alternative hypothesis, namely that the decline in U.S. social capital is responsible...

Intercultural traffic and mingling have been vital to economic innovation, past and present, witness the role of travellers, migrants and diasporas as cultural brokers. While intercultural exchange is a prominent theme in cultural studies, studies of ethnicity have often been more occupied by...

Views on poverty are deeply rooted in cultural frameworks about the human condition shaped by histories. In the debate on modernity, perspectives on poverty oscillate between: a) making the poor -- their "morals" and "culture" -- responsible for their own situation and b) positioning the causes...

What does predict the evolution over time of subjective well-being? We answer this question correlating cross country time series of subjective well-being with the time series of social capital and/or GDP. First, we adopt a bivariate methodology similar to the one used used by Stevenson and...

We investigate the relationship between social participation and the hours worked in the market. Social participation is the component of social capital that measures individuals’ engament in groups, associations and non-governmental organizations. We provide a model of consumer choice where...

Studies in the social capital literature have documented two stylised facts: first, a decline in measures of social participation has occurred in many OECD countries. Second, and more recently, the success of social networking sites (SNSs) has resulted in a steep rise in online social...