THE CONTRACTUAL APPROACH TO WELFARE STATE REFORM: AN EMPTY PROMISE?
by IREF 29 July 0
WP 2021-05. In the last three decades, the mainstream perspective to welfare policy design has emphasised the role of personal responsibility, and justified obligations to stay active in the labour market. Benefit claimants are entitled to support only if they register for job action plans or (...)
Offers they can’t refuse: a (negative) assessment of the impact on business and society at-large of the recent fortune of anti-discrimination laws and policies
by IREF 29 July 0
WP 2021-04. The article considers the relationship and balance between freedom of economic initiative and obligations deriving from anti-discrimination laws. After providing a theoretical framework of the problem of the limits to contractual autonomy arising from the horizontal application of (...)
Taxation and Forced Labor: The Two Bodies of the Citizen in Modern Political Theology
by IREF 7 July 0
WP 2021-03. In this article we will show that there is nothing innocent about taxation. We will investigate the various relations of the subject with political authority for the purpose of showing that monetarization of political exploitation did not modify the essence of domination. The (...)
The Italian Financial Novel. Finance as Told by Financial Professionals
by IREF 9 January 0
WP 2021-02. The global financial crisis of 2008 and the sovereign debt crisis of 2011 have raised the salience of finance as a subject of public interest among the Italian public. Banking and financial affairs have become a recurring theme in Italian cultural productions, such as novels and (...)
Behavioral Biases: How Markets Can Outperform Paternalism
by IREF 11 November 2020 0
WP 2020-07. Decisions in laboratory experiments often reveal departures from the rational decision maker framework. These findings have been employed to legitimize a paternalistic approach for the government calling for policies that protect citizens from their own behavioral biases. This (...)
Libertarian paternalism in policy making: empirical,methodological and philosophical problems
by IREF 4 October 2020 0
WP 2020-06. Nudge theory, according to its founders Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, is a kind of libertarian paternalism that helps people towards making choices that can improve their health, wealth and lives. The theory relies on the insights of the Heuristics & Biases research (...)
Establishing a revolutionary newspaper: transplanting liberalism in a pre-modern society
by IREF 3 October 2020 0
WP 2020-05. In late 1823 two representatives of the London Philhellenic Committee (a Philhellenic group established to support the Greek War of Independence from Ottoman rule) arrived in Missolonghi in Western Greece to administer a loan to the revolutionary Greek government and help the (...)
The contractual approach to welfare state reform
by IREF 29 September 2020 0
WP 2020-04. In the last three decades, the mainstream perspective to welfare policy design has emphasized the role of personal responsibility. The stress on personal responsibility has materialized through an obligation to stay active in the labour market. Benefit claimants are entitled to (...)
How much of today’s inequality is unfair?
by IREF 20 April 2020 0
WP 2020-03. From a procedural perspective, an economic process is fair or unfair depending on the rules of the game and the shape of the income distribution is irrelevant. As a component of the Rule of Law, equality before the law is a necessary condition for fairness. Recognizing a higher (...)
Certified Corona-Immunity as a Resource and Strategy to Cope with Pandemic Costs
by IREF 31 March 2020 0
WP 2020-02. A pandemic is not only a biological event and a public health disaster, but it also generates impacts that are worth understanding from a societal, historical, and cultural perspective. In this contribution, we argue that as the disease spreads, we are able to harness a valuable (...)