This paper develops a labour market matching model in order to address the problem of the persistence of the hidden sector and of its regional concentration, as in Italy and in the enlarged Europe. The main novel features of the model are that entrepreneurial ability affects job productivity,...

People gain enjoyment from exercising their agency and interacting with others in order to accomplish projects and change reality, as is evident from the successful evolution of homo sapiens. Hence, time can be enjoyable in both pursuing and achieving socially valued goals. Since modern economic...

A matching model will explain both unemployment and economic growth by considering the underground sector. Three problems can thus be simultaneously accounted for: (i) the persistence of underground economy, (ii) the ambiguous relationships between underground employment and unemployment, and...

The controversies on the relationship (or `gradient') between GDP and subjective well-being oppose those who claim that the gradient is positive and stable around the world to those who argue that long-run trends of subjective well-being are flat despite economic growth. The possible existence...

Research in the Economics of Happiness has recently paid increasing attention to ‘eudaimonia’, which is a conception of happiness originated in ancient Greek philosophy, and in particular in Aristotle’s philosophy. Since ‘eudaimonia’ is a way of life rather than a circumscribed goal,...

Understanding why many people spontaneously perform pro-environmental behaviours, rather than requiring some incentive, is an active area of research. To solve the puzzle, many studies address people's intrinsic motivation for this kind of behaviour. However, the term "intrinsic" remains...

The rise and decline of the Italian economy over the past 60 years form a surprisingly regular parabola, if the main European partner economies are taken as benchmark, so that its vertex equal to 1 means that Italy completely caught-up Europe around the 1990s. This implies that, in order to...

Economic growth and unemployment exhibit an ambiguous relationship – according to empirical studies. This ambiguity can be investigated by observing the role of the underground economy in shaping the productivity of firms. Indeed, unemployment may be absorbed by underground firms, which adopt...

The distinction made by the classical economists between necessaries and luxuries is weakened by two problems: how to draw the line between necessaries and luxuries in advanced modern economies; how to evaluate luxuries, whether positively for individual’s freedom and for the economy, or...