Fabio D'Orlando

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 models.

A Methodological Note on Long-Period Positions

This brief paper seeks to overcome a number of methodological disagreements among economists who use the long-period method of analysis. In particular, it attempts to clarify the key distinctions between convergence and stability, convergence and gravitation and chronological and theoretical persistence. The conclusion is that the theoretical soundness of the long-period method depends on the convergence of actual magnitudes towards their long-period counterparts, an empirical issue to which theoretical considerations of stability are irrelevant. A revised version of this paper appeared on Contributions to Political Economy (2007, n. 26).

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.

The demand for job protection: Some clues from behavioural economics

Radical differences in labour market regulations among countries that in other institutional respects are quite similar are still surprisingly frequent. Nonetheless, traditional theoretical analysis meets enormous difficulties in explaining these differences. The scope of our paper is to show that some clues from behavioural economics could be used to better theoretically treat this problem. Our argument is that workers are different, due to the effects of both culture and education. In particular, building on empirical evidence, we argue that loss aversion and hedonic adaptation are culturally-determined and country-specific aptitudes and that they may help explaining why workers, either employed or unemployed, ask for job protection and are willing to pay the cost of it. The main conclusion of our analysis is that, for poorly educated workers sharing a fatalist view of life, job protection can be more effective than public social expenditure. As a consequence, we suggest that countries with a poorly educated and fatalist workforce will be more prone to offer protection through job protection rather than public social expenditure, which is exactly what the empirical evidence shows.

The Market for Pornography in Italy: Empirical Data and Theoretical Considerations

The market for pornography is of great economic relevance but has been totally ignored in economic investigation. The present paper focuses on the demand side of this market, with the main aim of proposing a preliminary theoretical assessment of the behavior of pornography purchasers. In this respect, certain contributions on hedonic adaptation have proved particularly useful, whereas models of addiction have proved less useful than might be expected. To link theoretical analysis more closely to reality, the first half of the paper describes the pornography industry in Italy, and may thus be considered a sort of case study.

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.

The Market for Sexual Recreation in Italy: Empirical Data and Theoretical Considerations

This paper has two major goals. The first is to propose an evaluation of the economic weight of the sexual recreation industry in Italy. To achieve this goal data from different sources have been collected, and in some cases estimated when studies on specific topics were not available. The second goal is to propose some preliminary theoretical assessments of the evolution of this industry in recent years. To this end some recent contributions on two-sided markets, hedonic adaptation approaches and equilibrium matching models have proved particularly useful.