Suchergebnisse

This chapter draws a parallel between the macro-social dynamics of the nexus of the common good and the dynamics of personal agency within micro-social communities, where peripheral, vulnerable people experience stable relationships of personalised care. This parallel is plausible: authentic human and social development are both rooted in having experienced, at least embryonically, a possible answer to one's innermost aspirations—love, truth, beauty, justice…—and freely walk along that path. This paper summarises our research on micro-social relations, discussing how they can contribute to understanding and measuring the nexus of the common good. Do transformative micro-social relations also generate a dynamic of the common good, and how? What can we learn about the inner dynamics of the common good at the macro level, by looking at the micro-dynamics of personalised relations of care involving vulnerable people? These are reasonable questions: one can argue that the good of peripheral people is also good for society (we find echoes of this idea in different visions—from Rawls to Christian social teaching); or even that peripheries are a privileged viewpoint for observing reality.

Derivatives have been the most dynamic component of financial globalization in the Nineties, a period characterized by repeated phenomena of financial instability and crises. This paper underlines a largely neglected aspect of those crises: the fact that massive use of derivative instruments re-shuffles market risks in very opaque ways, so that traditional financial statistics may be of little use in diagnosing the "true" causes of a particular financial crisis. As a consequence, policy prescriptions may be quite inadequate. The paper reviews actors and instruments which contributed to innovative financial behaviours, the issues related to measuring leverage in financial transactions and within institutions; the functioning of highly leveraged institutions. These building blocks allow an assessment of the actual information value of balance of payments statistics, and also an assessment of the role of derivative instruments in speculative attacks, with an example about "exotic" derivatives in the 1994 Mexican crisis.

The paper presents the results of a Longitudinal Lab-in-the-Field Experiment implemented between September 2015 and July 2016 performed in two State Prisons in California (USA) to measure change in prosocial preferences. A subset of eligible inmates willing to undertake GRIP (Guiding Rage Into Power) program, were randomly assigned to it. The paper tests whether the participation to this program (used as a treatment in the experiments) affects prosocial preferences of participants, with specific reference to trust. The results of a Difference-in-Differences (DID) estimation procedure show that trust significantly increased in GRIP participants compared to the control group. This result is robust to alternative estimation techniques and to the inclusion of an endogenous behavioral measure of altruism.