Electronic Resources and Heterodox Economists

The idea of measuring scientific relevance by counting citations is gaining ever-growing consensus among economists, and thanks to the electronic bibliographic resources now available the procedure has become relatively simple and fast. However, when it comes to putting the idea into practice many challenging problems emerge. This paper uses five of the principal bibliographic electronic resources (EconLit, JSTOR, Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar) to test the practical applicability of this method for measuring relevance to the particular case of heterodox economics.heterodox economists; EconLit; JSTOR; Web of Science; Scopus; Google Scholar

Swinger Economics

Swinging is a sexual behavior of increasing relevance but substantially ignored in theoretical economic investigation. This paper has two major goals. The first is to describe what swinging is, discuss its economic relevance and single out the main characteristics of swinger behavior. To this end, the Italian situation has been considered as a type of case study. The second goal is to use standard and less-standard tools from economic theory to propose some preliminary assessments of the causes and consequences of swinger couples’ behavior. In this respect, some contributions on two-sided markets, hedonic adaptation approaches and equilibrium matching models have proved particularly useful.Swinging, swingers, hedonic adaptation, sex, sexual customs

Behavioral Foundations for the Keynesian Consumption Function

This paper has two main goals. The first is to show that behavioral rather than maximizing principles emerge from textual analysis as the microeconomic foundations for Keynes’s Consumption Theory; the second goal is to demonstrate that it is possible to ground a Keynesian-type aggregate Consumption function on the basis of (some of) the principles underlying contemporary behavioral modelsKeynes, Behavioral Economics, Keynesian Theory, Consumption, Hyperbolic Discounting, Mental Accounting

Culturally-based beliefs and labour market institutions

This paper has two main goals. The first is to provide empirical evidence that differences in labour market institutions across countries and, specifically, in how they provide protection to workers, can be attributed to underlying differences in culturally-based prior beliefs: in particular, people’s fatalism and trust in others. The second goal is to single out the socio-economic factors associated with these beliefs and the role of education in this regard.Culture, Fatalism, Trust in Others, Labour Market Institutions, Employment Protection Legislation

The benefits of stabilization policies revisited

Traditional theoretical literature which neglects the benefits of stabilization policies (e.g., Lucas 1987 and 2003) ultimately relies on the small impact that macroeconomic volatility has on aggregate income and consumption. In this article, we argue that such an approach is both theoretically and empirically weak. From the theoretical viewpoint, the cost of volatility should be measured including not only monetary magnitudes, but also those psychological costs whose relevance has been stressed by behavioural economics and which are correlated with the number of unemployment episodes. We refer here to the implications for experienced utility of loss aversion, the endowment effect and hedonic adaptation. This theoretical problem is coupled with the empirical finding that the effects of downturns are not randomly distributed and serially uncorrelated, i.e., they affect more frequently those who have less (in terms of skills, income and wealth) and who suffer greater wellbeing losses from each shock. It follows that the traditional (and Lucas) analysis disregards the main causes of wellbeing losses determined by downturns. Hence, it cannot be considered as a theoretically sound basis for denying the usefulness of policies aimed at preventing downturns and/or of micro regulation policies aimed at preventing the impact of downturns and labour force reallocation on the labour market