Maurizio Pugno

Did the Decline in Social Capital Depress Americans' Happiness?

Most popular explanations cannot fully account for the declining trend of U.S. reported well-being during the last thirty years. We test the hypothesis that the relationship between social capital and happiness at the individual level accounts for what is left unexplained by previous research. We provide three main findings. First, several indicators of social capital are significantly correlated with reported happiness. Second, social capital indicators for the period 1975-2004 show a declining trend. Finally, the trend of happiness can be largely accounted for by the increasing trend of income, the increasing trend of reference income and the declining trend of social capital – in particular by the decline of its relational and non-instrumental components

Job performance and job satisfaction: an integrated survey

The empirical evidence from the econometrics of self-reported job satisfaction and from organisational psychology on job performance confronts economic theory with some puzzling results. Job performance is found to be positively correlated with job satisfaction, whereas effort is assumed to be a disutility in the theory. Economic incentives are not found to be the main motivations of job performance; in some cases, indeed, they are even counterproductive. Interest in the job is found to account better for job satisfaction. This paper proposes an integrated approach to these issues by (i) conducting an interdisciplinary critical survey, (ii) proposing a simple economic framework within which to explain the puzzles. The key idea behind this framework is that intrinsic motivations and self-esteem help explain both job satisfaction and job performance. The employer can thus adopt other, more friendly actions, besides using incentives and controls to enhance performance by employees.

The Underground Economy and the Underdevelopment Trap

A general equilibrium model is proposed which assumes that firms hire both official and unregistered workers as imperfect substitutes, that entrepreneurs differ in their ability to increase the efficiency of official labour, and that this ability is due to heterogeneous original ability and to Marshallian (non-linear) externalities. In equilibrium, smaller firms hire fewer official workers and are less efficient. If externalities increase sufficiently when firms are numerous, two stable equilibria exist where the number and the size of firms, the proportion of official employment, overall output and efficiency are, respectively, small (the trap) and large. The increase of individual ability due to, e.g., educational policies, has positive effects on the equilibrium number of firms, overall output, and labour regularisation. High and evenly distributed entrepreneurship also make it more likely that increased externalities and penalties on the underground economy will have positive effects. These results may contribute to the current debate on the underground economy in the Southern areas of Italy

Structural stability in a cross-country neoclassical growth model

This paper tests for structural stability of the Solow growth model, as recently extended to human capital and applied to a large section of countries by Mankiw, Romer and Weil. The evidence is obtained by ranking each explanatory variable of the model in ascending order and then running recursive regressions and by then splitting the original sample according to cluster analysis before running separate regressions. The evidence shows that the model exhibits overall structural breaks; the convergence coefficient, however, is very stable; the coefficients of the production factors become unstable where the factors become very abundant or very scarce; the coefficient of labour growth is negative and significant, as required by the theory, only if a small group of countries with scarce labour is considered; the same coefficient is instead positive and significant for a group of countries with abundant labour and favourable initial income and investments; the coefficient of investment in human capital is not ...

A Kaldorian model of economic growth with labour shortage and major technical changes

Abstract This paper presents an export-led model of growth and fluctuations. It explains the growth path of an economy which, having entered the international market with a competitive price level, (i) accelerates economic growth and expands export share in world trade, (ii) approaches a labour shortage that raises wages and worsens both competitiveness and economic growth, and (iii) reacts with a shock of technical change that restores previous dynamics but starting from a higher wage level. Point (i) is made on the basis of the Kaldorian model of cumulative causation, point (ii) on the Goodwin model of cycle in growth and distribution of income, and point (iii) on an idea of Schumpeter. The model is able to capture a typical experience of industrialisation in the most successful LDCs.

On Competing Theories of Economic Growth: a Cross-country Evidence

In the recent literature on economic growth, four approaches compete to explain growth trends in per capita GDP of the world set of countries: (1) the Solovian approach; (2) the New Theory of Endogenous Growth; (3) the Abramovitz–Baumol ‘catching up’ approach; (4) the Kaldor approach of increasing returns and cumulative causation. Approaches (3) and (4) are formalized here in a single model and then tested against approaches (1) and (2) on a common database and sample of countries. The main conclusions are the following: that labour is not the limiting factor on growth, as implied by (1) and (2); that catching up is an important and a non-declining process; that increasing returns to output rather than to capital are very important and accelerate the catch-up with the US trend; that a lack of social capabilities and technological push may reverse catching up into falling behind with respect to the US productivity level; and that the pattern of growth changes between 1960–73 and 1973–88 because physical in...

The Subjective Well-being Paradox: A Suggested Solution Based on Relational Goods

This book is a welcome consolidation and extension of the recent expanding debates on happiness and economics. Happiness and economics, as a new field for research, is now of pivotal interest particularly to welfare economists and psychologists. This Handbook provides an unprecedented forum for discussion of the economic issues relating to happiness. It reviews the more recent literature and offers the interested reader an insight into the vast scope of the field in terms of the theory, its applications and also experimental design. The Handbook also gives substantial indications as to the future direction of research in the field, with particular regard to policy applications and developing an economics of interpersonal relations which includes reciprocity and social interaction theory.

Entrepreneurship and the Hidden Economy: An Extended Matching Model

This paper develops a labour market matching model in order to address the problem of the persistence of the hidden sector and of its regional concentration, as in Italy and in the enlarged Europe. The main novel features of the model are that entrepreneurial ability affects job productivity, and that regular firms receive negative externalities from the hidden sector, which may capture the pressure typically exerted by corruption and organized crime, and positive externalities from the other regular firms. At least one interior equilibrium emerges, thus providing an explanation for the so-called “shadow puzzle”, with the possibility that tougher monitoring may reduce both the hidden sector and unemployment. If externalities are non-linear, two equilibria may emerge, thus accounting for regional dualism. The “better” equilibrium is in fact characterised by a smaller hidden sector, higher levels of overall productivity, output, entrepreneurial ability used, extra-profits, relative wages, and more favourable externalities.

Scitovsky's The Joyless Economy and the economics of happiness

Abstract Scitovskys The Joyless Economy is especially well-known in recent economic studies on happiness. However, his insightful contributions have not been taken up as they deserve, mainly because they were, and still are, too original. By reconstructing Scitovskys analysis on the basis of all his relevant writings, this article integrates his most original concepts, such as novelty, consumption skill, endogenous preferences, pleasurable uncertainty, into conventional economics; it compares Scitovskys analysis to the economic thought of his time and to current consumer theory and it reveals his contributions to happiness economics, such as an original interpretation of the Easterlin paradox.

Life Satisfaction, Social Capital and the Bonding-Bridging Nexus

The paper investigates the relation between social capital and life satisfaction focusing on the distinction between bonding and bridging. Using the latest version of the combined World and European Values Surveys, the authors first address the question of measurement of social capital by means of a multi-step factor analysis. Through this procedure, they nd that proxies typically used for social capital tend to polarize around two dimensions interpreted as bonding and bridging. These two dimensions are in fact associated with a single latent variable with opposite signs suggesting that they describe two sides of the same latent variable rather than two independent latent variables. The authors call this latent variable the locus of socializing and use it to explore the relation between social capital and life satisfaction across world citizens and across groups of similar countries. The results indicate that people with extreme bonding or bridging attitudes are less happy than people with more balanced attitudes. Unlike the literature on social capital and economic growth that finds bridging attitudes more desirable than bonding attitudes, they nd that bonding attitudes are at least as important as bridging attitudes for life satisfaction. This suggests that the social capital dimensions important for economic growth may not necessarily coincide with the social capital dimensions important for life satisfaction.