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Since decades the G7 is an informal body where important decisions for the global economic governance are taken. The current composition of the G7 does no longer mirror the current balance of economic and demographic powers. New powers have emerged, and these may legitimately claim a seat in the world’s most influential economic policy club. Using well-established power indices, I show first the distribution of power between the incumbent members of the Group. Second, I propose two possible new compositions. Third, in the perspective of an increasing integration between the EU countries, I introduce one EU representative in the G7 in place of the current four European countries. These new compositions of the G7 are more representative of the current state of the world, give voice to a larger share of the world population and distribute the power between the major global actors more evenly than it is today, eliminating the overwhelming leadership of the USA. The analysis is based on power indices that evaluate ex-ante power and assume a decision process similar to that which goes on in governments and parliaments, where the members vote and where parties have a share of votes corresponding to their share of seats.

Several papers in experimental economics use reaction times (RTs) to assess whether a decision is instinctive or not. This paper analyses a field experiment (the behaviour of athletes at the World Swimming Championships) in three steps, where only the (expected) payoff changes (i.e. increases) from one step to the next. The payoff depends on the time of the race, of which the RT is part. Considering, for each competition, a homogeneous sample of swimmers, the paper shows that RTs decrease as the expected payoff increase. The observed reductions are comparable in magnitude to those observed in other experiments, where conscious/cognitive process are induced (or, at least, present). The paper concludes claiming that a share of the observed RTs is determined through a cognitive process, and therefore RTs are not pure measures of instinctiveness.

Voting gender gap characterises several countries, and it is likely to translate into the composition of elected assemblies and governments. Starting from given preferences of the electors, different electoral rules may translate this gap into different outcomes in terms of composition of the parliament. To amplify or to attenuate this gap results in generating a sort of gender inequality. In this work, I inquiry if and to which extent the different electoral rules may generate gender inequality when translating votes into seats. First, I present a theoretical framework to capture the potential of an electoral system to amplify or attenuate the voting gender gap. Then, using survey data and different indices of representativeness and of governability, I provide some empirical test for the theoretical framework. Both the theory and the simulations indicate that majority systems magnify the gender gap, while proportional rules are likely to reproduce it with minimal distortions.

This paper aims at establishing whether gender and children affect the ecological preferences of people. In particular the willingness to spend money for improving the environment is considered. Using data for 51 countries taken from the World Value Survey, this paper shows that women are in general more prone to spend money for ecological purposes, although fathers are more willing to pay than mothers are. The estimation uses several interaction variables and country-specific controls to isolate the variables of interest as much as possible.

Access to credit and its cost is a major challenge for farmers in developing countries. Formal moneylenders often ration these economic agents, as they lack assets to give as collateral for the loans. Consequently, farmers resort to informal credit. Several studies show that land serves as collateral for accessing formal credit, but they often do not find any significant effect of land size on access to informal credit. Here I study the effects of land ownership on both the demand and the cost of informal credit in the Mekong Delta. The results show that as land ownership increases, both the demand and the cost of informal loans decrease. This result is relevant in developing countries, where land reforms are still ongoing, as it shows that land redistribution may contribute to the development of formal credit markets.

Massive use of pesticides is one of the major environmental problems in developing countries. I analyse the correlation between land ownership and use of pesticides in the Mekong Delta. On the one hand, the negative effects of pesticides on the long-run soil productivity should discourage owners to use pesticides. On the other hand, these chemicals increase the productivity in the short-run, pushing farmers to increase their use. The results show that the first effect prevails (i.e. land owners are more prone to increase the quantity of pesticides used than land renters are) and that sensitising programmes on the harmfulness of chemicals have no apparent effect on the farmers’ choice to increase the quantity of pesticides used.

The rising star of scholarly publishing is Open Access. Even some traditional journals now offer this option on author payment, and many full freely accessible journals are now available to scholars, providing relief to research institutions increasingly unable to afford the escalating subscription rates of serials. However, proper recognition of full Open Access journals by the community remains a major obstacle to overcome if they are to become a viable alternative for scholarly communication. Through a survey, this work investigates economics scholars’ attitudes to OA, and attempts to outline the state of practices and norms governing individuals’ publication choices.

This paper analyzes the contribution of youth's different time allocations to positive behaviours in exchanges. In particular the psychological literature states that spending time within youth voluntary organizations fosters positive development of the young more than hanging out with friends. This paper aims at deepening the knowledge of the psychological bases of the observed outcomes of a basic trust game. Undergraduate students played a basic trust game and filled in a questionnaire collecting information about the use of their spare time. It emerges that higher passed amounts positively correlate with more time spent in youth organizations, but hanging out with friends seems to have no correlation. Moreover, according to the psychological literature, the causality mechanism should go from participation to social networks to higher levels of trust, altruism, reciprocity and inequity aversion.

This paper sheds some light on the link between participation to voluntary associations and trusting strangers. Through a traditional trust game, I examine participants' behaviour in the light of their involvement in different types of voluntary associations. This involvement is measured as weekly time spent by the player within each kind of organizations. Results show a positive link between trust and those associations, whose goals also comprise instilling values such as reciprocity and cooperation. Results are robust for different analytical methodologies, and appear to be strongly gender-driven.

A puzzle in experiments is the gender effect: women and men tend to behave differently. However there is not clear evidence why the gender effect is not constant across repetitions of the same experiment with different samples. For this reason genetic explanations are not satisfactory. This paper tells a different story: genes are not responsible, what matters is segregation. After exploring a wide range of trust games played around the world, this paper presents the result of an investment game repeated in Italy and Norway. Both the literature review and the experiment described in this paper agree on the fact that women from a more emancipated society do not play differently than men. On the opposite side, where emancipation is still scarce, the usual gender effect is observed. I measure emancipation here by the means of a couple of UNDP indicators: the Gender Development Index and the Gender Empowerment Index.

The economic literature has discussed the links between trust and gender, and trust and social capital. Given that some empirical evidence shows also that gender and trust are somehow related and specifically women tend to trust less than men, I try to investigate the effect of social capital on generalized trust, controlling also for the "gender effect". This latter could be due to the fact that women are less prone to invest in social capital than men, as the literature highlights. Using the tools of experimental economy, I performed the same experiment in Oslo, Leuven and Torino, in order to obtain a mixed Western European sample. In this one I included Scandinavia, Central and Mediterranean Europe. My measure of social capital is more complete than the usual one: I add informal networks (such as phone conversations, time spent with friends, etc.) to formal ones (basically voluntary associations). Analysing the obtained results through both comparisons of conditional means and econometrics, I find out some influence of social capital on trust. Furthermore, also after controlling for social capital, gender differences persist still. Thus I can conclude that behavioural differences due to gender are not a mere reflex of different investments in social capital. I also found evidence that some kinds of formal and informal networks exert positive influence on generalized trust.

This paper investigates the link between some individual characteristics and voluntary association membership. This latter is considered a measure of social capital. Among the formers we included gender, age, geographical location and received religious education. The listed characteristics have been found to affect several economic variables; also social capital is proved to exert some effects on economic determinants. Our findings are that most of the exogenous features are strongly linked to investment in social capital.