categories can be helpful in analysing the psycho-social needs, although it is recognised that people affected by a ME can belong to different categories at the same time (a person can be both hospitalised and a relative of somebody deceased). It is also recognised that using a classification system that relates to the degree of physical injury is not the only method that could be used, and tha...

We extend a standard overlapping-generations general-equilibrium model with idiosyncratic working ability shocks to design the optimal social security pension system. There are two main features in our approach. First, we keep track of individual social security wealth explicitly so that we can evaluate a wide range of policies, including “private accounts,” seamlessly. Second, we express our s...

I consider the saving and investment decisions of American and Italian consumers in a lifecycle model with temptation preferences. Comparing the choices with and without Social Security protection, I show that savings are postponed, less wealth is accumulated, and the portfolio share held in equities at retirement is larger with Social Security. Social Security distorts the decisions of agents ...

This paper is a critical review of Robert Putnam’s influential analysis of social capital in America: Bowling Alone. The review argues that Bowling Alone reflects many of the strengths and weaknesses of the social capital literature. Like this literature, Bowling Alone describes a remarkable number of facts concerning community life in America. At the same time, the book suffers from many of th...

The Wage Effects of Social Norms: Evidence of Deviations from Peers’ Body-Mass in Europe We investigate wage effects of deviations from peer group body mass index (BMI) to evaluate the influence of social norms on wages. Our approach allows for disentangling the influence of the social norm from any (anticipated) productivity effects associated with deviations from a clinically recommended BMI....

Using cross-country data from a sample of low, middle and high-income countries, the paper provides the first empirical test of the empirical relationships between national measures of social capital (civic and public), social divergence and social capacity upon various indicators of national environmental performance. The results indicate a possible link between public social capital (democrac...

We investigate how the patterns of consumption and accumulation, as well as the patterns of time allocation and of social interaction, may be influenced by ‘social pressure’, i.e., by the choices of others. We display an evolutionary model involving several generations of interacting individuals, in which different patterns may coexist in equilibrium and in which path dependence and critical ma...

We consider a setup where agents care about i) taking actions that are close to their preferences, and ii) coordinating with others. The preferences of agents in the same group are drawn from the same distribution. Each individual is exogenously matched with other agents randomly selected from the population. Starting from an environment where everyone belongs to the same group, we show that in...

high inflation has been as one of the characteristics of developing countries including iran and its economic and social impacts are extensive. compiling policies for economic development requires that inflation impacts on different social classes should be studied carefully. microeconomic analyses show that because of higher increase in price of goods that have higher share in consumption bund...

Social norms are usually neglected in economics, because they are to a large extent enforced through non-market interactions and difficult to isolate empirically. In this paper, we offer a direct measure of the social norm to work and we show that this norm has important economic effects. The stronger the norm, the more quickly unemployed people find a new job. This behavior can be explained by...