This paper places itself at the intersection between the literature on "Demeny voting" (the proposal of letting custodial parents exercise their children's voting rights until they come of age) and the vast literature on formal models with endogenous fertility that address the problem of fiscal...

The subject of this paper is how the epistemic limitations of individuals and their biases in reasoning affect collective decisions and in particular the functioning of democracies. In fact, while the cognitive sciences have largely shown how the imperfections of human rationality shape...

Despite the striking evidence of the changing sectoral composition in employment and output shares characterizing the growth process, structural change is usually disregarded in growth modeling. In contrast, we focus on how structural change can affect aggregate growth by presenting a two-sector...

How can the euro area tackle its perennial problems of core/periphery imbalances and anaemic long-term growth? According to network members Luigi Bonatti and Andrea Fracasso, Università di Trento, there is no quick-fix solution. Temporary fiscal stimulus does not produce permanent improvements,...

Italy, together with other Southern European countries, represents an anomaly in the history of modern migration. In the last three decades, the country has attracted a substantial number of migrants while its employment rate has remained structurally low because of a persistently high...

The European debt crisis has brought about permanent changes in the Eurozone (EZ). The no-bailout rule was - de facto - removed, new institutions such as the ESM and the banking union were designed and partially implemented, new monitoring and surveillance schemes, such as the macroeconomic...

We study how public policies affects an economy where production emits pollutants and investment in productive assets raises the economy's overall productivity. We explore two hypotheses about how the accumulation of pollutants affects human well-being. Under the first one, there is no limit to...

In this paper, the expansion of private production erodes the quality of commonly owned goods, thereby forcing individuals to rely increasingly on private goods to satisfy their needs. In the face of this deterioration, households keep their labour supplies and saving rates relatively high in...

This paper discusses the potential introduction of permanent public subsidies to supplement the wages of low-paid workers in Italy, taking inspiration from Edmund Phelps' ideas on supporting the working poor. We consider how a negative taxation scheme for low-wage earners might address...