Francesco Ferrante

Education, Aspirations and Life Satisfaction

Indeed, the model seeks to go beyond the Italian case and provide more general insights into how age/life satisfaction relationships can be modelled and explained. I test the models predictions on Italian data and find preliminary support for the idea that education and access to stimulating environments may have a perverse impact on life satisfaction. I also find evidence that the latter effect is mediated by factors such as gender and age. In this paper I suggest that expanding work and consumption opportunities is a good thing for decision utility but may not be so for experienced utility. On this premise, I argue that people may overrate their socioeconomic prospects relative to real life chances and I discuss how systematic frustration over unfulfilled expectations can be connected to peoples educational achievement. The idea that expanding work and consumption opportunities always increases peoples wellbeing is well established in economics but finds no support in psychology. Instead, there is evidence in both economics and psychology that peoples life satisfaction depends on how experienced utility compares with expectations of life satisfaction or decision utility. In this paper I suggest that expanding work and consumption opportunities is a good thing for decision utility but may not be so for experienced utility. On this premise, I argue that people may overrate their socioeconomic prospects relative to real life chances and I discuss how systematic frustration over unfulfilled expectations can be connected to peoples educational achievement. I test the models predictions on Italian data and find preliminary support for the idea that education and access to stimulating environments may have a perverse impact on life satisfaction. I also find evidence that the latter effect is mediated by factors such as gender and age. Indeed, the model seeks to go beyond the Italian case and provide more general insights into how age/life satisfaction relationships can be modelled and explained.

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.

Bounded Opportunity: A Knowledge-Based Approach to Opportunity Recognition and Development

This article is premised on the underlying notion that knowledge is crucial to the opportunity recognition and development process. Springboarding from the insights of Atkinson and Stiglitz (1969) on the localized nature of knowledge accumulation, we define a feasible solution space and examine the implications of entrepreneurial knowledge in the recognition and development of opportunity within this space. Distinguishing between two forms of entrepreneurial knowledge, namely context dependent idiosyncratic knowledge or tacit knowledge, and codified knowledge, the primary aim of this article is to propose a knowledge-based model of opportunity within a bounded solution space. Our discussion of this model includes elaboration on how the composition of entrepreneurial knowledge predicts major path differences for the expansion and development of opportunities.This article is premised on the underlying notion that knowledge is crucial to the opportunity recognition and development process. Springboarding from the insights of Atkinson and Stiglitz (1969) on the localized nature of knowledge accumulation, we define a feasible solution space and examine the implications of entrepreneurial knowledge in the recognition and development of opportunity within this space. Distinguishing between two forms of entrepreneurial knowledge, namely context dependent idiosyncratic knowledge or tacit knowledge, and codified knowledge, the primary aim of this article is to propose a knowledge-based model of opportunity within a bounded solution space. Our discussion of this model includes elaboration on how the composition of entrepreneurial knowledge predicts major path differences for the expansion and development of opportunities.

Employment Protection Legislation and Redistribution

The numerous studies on preferences for redistribution in recent years offers a wealth of insights into the interactions between institutions and economic outcomes. In this paper I posit that labour market institutions can be and have been used to mitigate the regressive effects of market failures in education and in the provision of employment insurance and offer empirical evidence on OECD countries supporting this view. It is argued that peoples perception of the fairness of market and non-market institutions affects both the demand for redistribution and the choice of the instruments to achieve it. The analysis is retrospective but may help to assess the future impact on inequality of labour market reforms in those European countries still sharing solidaristic social preferences. The main policy stance envisaged in the paper is that since social transfers and unemployment protection are substitutes in the generation of social insurance and redistribution, to offset the regressive impact of labour deregulation, appropriate unemployment benefit schemes or universal systems of social protection should be improved or instituted. Finally, any forward-looking reform of the welfare systems aiming to increase labour market flexibility should channel more money to education and training programs.

HeritageBot Service Robot assisting in Cultural Heritage

This paper presents results of HeritageBot, a regional research project for developing a robotic platform to be used in Cultural Heritage frameworks. The design and a prototype of HBOT Platform for demo purposes is introduced with features of low-cost construction and user-oriented performance. The design requirements are presented for application in monitoring and working within frames for conservation of goods of Cultural Heritage with characteristics that are aimed for technological transfer and entrepreneurship plans.

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.

Idiosyncratic Learning, Creative Consumption and Well-Being

The consensus view is that economists should observe consumer choices and abstain from investigating the psychological and physiological causes of wants, or the mechanisms governing the formation of preferences. This may be a correct procedure as far as ordinary functional goods are concerned. Problems tend to arise with creative goods (e.g. cultural goods) whose consumption (i) requires skills acquired through education and experience and (ii) generates positive and negative feedbacks and learning-by-consuming processes. This paper presents a simple model of local learning explaining the idiosyncratic accumulation of consumption human capital. Consumption generates local feedback mechanisms whose characteristics depend on the nature of goods and on the type of agent. The model provides some insights on the microeconomics of creative consumption and on the specific role of education.

Induced Technical Change, Scientific Advance and the Efficient Control of Pollution

Departing from a perfectly competitive economic environment where Pigovian pricing is the most efficient means of corrective action, government policy towards the control of pollution in oligopolistic industries may take many forms. However, formal environmental economic analysis of the scope for government action has tended to focus on a rather narrow range of policy tools, in particular a tax on emissions,1 marketable permit schemes and emission standards. Perhaps the most significant shortcoming of the approach is that it overlooked the role of technical change in affecting the choice of pollution control measures.

Opportunities, Aspirations and Life Satisfaction

The idea that expanding work and consumption opportunities always increases peoples wellbeing is well established in economics but finds no support in psychology (Schwartz and al. 2002). Instead, there is evidence in both economics and psychology that peoples life satisfaction depends on how experienced utility compares with expectations of life satisfaction or decision utility (Kahneman et al., 1997, Clark and Oswald, 1997; Easterlin, 2005; Clark, Frijters and Shields M., 2007). In this paper I suggest that expanding work and consumption opportunities are a good thing for decision utility but may not be so for experienced utility. To show this, I develop an empirical model where peoples experienced and expected life satisfaction depend on education and environmental opportunities. Building on Easterlin (2001), I argue that people may overrate their future socioeconomic prospects relative to real life chances and I discuss how systematic frustration over unfulfilled expectations is endogenously generated and can adversely affect life satisfaction. I suggest that the aspirations-induced bias in prediction and its impact on life satisfaction depend not only on peoples perceived work and consumption opportunities, but also on personal characteristics such as gender and age. Indeed, the model aspires to provide more general insights into how to model and explain the age and gender-life satisfaction relationships centred on the role of education in the construction of aspirations. I test the models predictions on Italian data and find support for the idea that education and access to stimulating environments may have a perverse impact on life satisfaction. I also find evidence, consistent with the empirical contributions available, that the impact of aspirations on life satisfaction is mediated by factors such as gender and age.

The entrepreneurial engagement of Italian university students: some insights from a population-based survey

ABSTRACT Start-ups founded by university students and graduates play a substantial role in bringing new knowledge to the market and in employment creation, a role that appears to be even more important than that played by the typical technology transfer activities carried out by universities. We use a population-based approach to explore entrepreneurship among 61,115 graduate alumni of 64 Italian universities. In order to assess the potential supply of highly educated entrepreneurs, we develop a novel empirical approach to analyse engagement in entrepreneurship, based on the idea that entrepreneurship is a process that begins with intention and ends in action. We find that the share of intentional entrepreneurs, among recent cohorts of graduates in Italy, is large in comparison to the small share of actual entrepreneurs detected five years after graduation. We discuss which barriers may deter intentional entrepreneurs from being engaged in entrepreneurship and how universities can trigger the entrepreneurial process and close the gap between entrepreneurial intentions and action.