Bruna Bruno

Voluntary work and wages

The effects of voluntary work on earnings have recently been studied for some developed countries such as Canada, France and Austria. This paper extends this line of research to Italy, using data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) dataset. A double methodological approach is used in order to control for unobserved heterogeneity: Heckman and IV methods are employed to account for unobserved worker heterogeneity and endogeneity bias. Empirical results show that, when the unobserved heterogeneity is taken into account, a wage premium of 2.7 percent emerges, quite small if compared to previous investigations on Canada and Austria. The investigation into the channels of influence of volunteering on wages gives support to the hypotheses that volunteering enables the access to fruitful informal networks, avoids the human capital deterioration and provides a signal for intrinsically motivated individuals.

Innovation Policies: Strategy of Growth in a Complex Perspective

The aim of this chapter is to highlight new understandings of innovation as an interactive process in relation to economic growth. The resulting ideas could be of considerable interest to innovation policy makers. Two impacts are of considerable potential importance. The first relates to the absorption of complex and evolutionary systems dynamics ideas into the study of innovation, and growth. The second relates to the synthesis of complex systems ideas with evolutionary models of innovation, and growth. Considering innovation as a complex multi-level process means that it is not possible to devise the context into independent ways and that it is not enough to provide policymakers with simple solutions, but it should help them formulate and address questions that are appropriate to the evolutionary and complex context within which they operate.