RIVISTA INTERNAZIONALE DI SCIENZE SOCIALI

This study estimates the cost of raising children, which we also term the ‘‘price’’ of children, in the context of the collective theory of the household following Lazear and Michael’s (1988) method, not yet applied in the literature. Determination of the price of a child requires knowledge of the rule that governs how resources are allocated within the family, that is how much is spent for adults and how much for children. Though our estimate of that cost does not include an evaluation of parental time invested in one’s offspring, we investigate the relationship between the cost of raising children and procreative choices and, thanks to the possibility of deriving individual welfare functions for each household component, child poverty. On average, the price of a child amounts to 60 percent of the cost of an adult. Further, we find that the cost of raising a child depends on household income and decreases with family size. As expected, it significantly and negatively affects the likelihood of having children. Child poverty levels, as directly inferred from children’s welfare, are considerably higher than that derived from conventional measures.

Counterfeiting is a constantly growing phenomenon with economic, social and political implications. Considering consumers’ awareness, the counterfeit market includes two sub-markets, the deceptive market and the non-deceptive market. In the first case consumers are cheated since they believe to have purchased an original product, when in fact it is a fake. In the second case, consumers are fully aware they have bought a knock-off. The paper takes the form of a socio-cultural analysis linked to the price/quality relation to answer the question if it is in the interest of conscious consumer to have a role in the fight against counterfeiting. What emerges is that conscious consumer has not such an interest, therefore the only possibility to succeed in the fight against counterfeiting is to make consumers aware of the dangers related to it and to strengthen the legislative framework.

We study an economy where the labour market is plagued with search imperfections and is segmented along a set of professions. To enter a profession, workers need to undertake a specific educational investment. At the time of the investment, however, workers are imperfectly informed on the outlook offered by any profession as they only observe a private and a public signal concerning this outlook. We show that imperfect information induces misallocation of labour across professions and increases the rate of unemployment. We also show that, contrary to the policy advice of some labour market observers, an increase in the precision of the public signal does not necessarily lead to a reduction in the rate of unemployment.

D. SCHILIRO` (W.A. Barnett - B.S. Sergi, Banking and Finance Issues in Emerging Markets)
L. ESPOSITO - G. MASTROMATTEO The nature and meaning of cryptocurriencies (M. Amato - L. Fantacci, Per un pugno di bitcoin. Rischi e opportunità delle monete virtuali)