This paper carries out an investigation into the socio-economic determinants of couples’ childbearing decisions in Italy. Since having children is in most cases a “couple matter”, the analysis accounts for the characteristics of both the possible parents. Our results do not support...

Paper presented at the Conference “From GDP to Well-Being: Economics on the Road to Sustainability”, Ancona, Italy, 3-5 December 2009. <p> Abstract <p> We develop a dynamic model to analyze the sources and the evolution of social participation and social capital in a growing economy characterized...</p></p>

The aim of this paper is to trace a map of Italian local social capital endowments. It focuses on the structuraldimension of the concept, as identified with social networks. The analysis is based on a dataset collected by the author including about two hundred indicators of five main social...

This paper addresses two hot topics of the contemporary debate, social capital and economic growth. Our theoretical analysis sheds light on decisive but so far neglected issues: how does social capital accumulate over time? Which is the relationship between social capital, technical progress and...

Which kind of social capital fosters the diffusion of development-oriented trust? This paper carries out an empirical investigation into the causal relationships connecting four types of social capital (i.e. bonding, bridging, linking, and corporate), and different forms of trust...

The main idea behind this paper is that social capital is not, as generally suggested by the socio-economic literature, an individual attitude towards something which does not imply privately appropriable economic benefits. Actually, SC might and should be interpreted as a public component of an...

This paper carries out an assessment of the influence that different kinds of social ties exert on labour precariousness, on the state of health of urban environments and on the economic performance in Italy. Overall, the empirical evidence shows that weak ties connecting members of voluntary...

This paper carries out an empirical assessment of the causal nexus connecting social capital's diverse aspects to the "quality" of economic development in Italy. The analysis accounts for three main social capital dimensions (i.e. bonding, bridging and linking social capital) and measures them...

Empirical studies have documented a decline in indicators of social participation in the last decades. The responsibility of social disengagement has been often attributed to pervasive busyness and the rising pressure of time. In this paper we argue that computer-mediated interaction, and...

The public health literature focusing on the detrimental effects of social isolation has shown that the quantity of social connections is positively correlated with individual health. Drawing on pooled cross-sectional data, we test this hypothesis on a representative sample of the Italian...