Existing datasets provided by statistical agencies (e.g. Eurostat) show that the economic and financial crisis that unfolded in 2008 significantly impacted the lives and livelihoods of young people across Europe. Taking these official statistics as a starting point, the collaborative research project "Cultural Pathways to Perceived economic self-sufficiency: a country-and…

We study a prototypical model of a Parliament with two Parties or two Political Coalitions and we show how the introduction of a variable percentage of randomly selected independent legislators can increase the global efficiency of a Legislature, in terms of both the number of laws passed and the average social welfare obtained. We also analytically find an "efficiency golden rule" which allows to fix the optimal number of legislators to be selected at random after that regular elections have established the relative proportion of the two Parties or Coalitions. These results are in line with both the ancient Greek democratic system and the recent discovery that the adoption of random strategies can improve the efficiency of hierarchical organizations.

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We present a simple principal-agent model with an employer and two types of employees/workers, low and high skilled. Low-skilled workers are envious of their high-skilled peers, and incur a disutility cost whenever the latter receive a positive surplus from their labor contract. We show that: i) if the envy cost is relatively low (high), high-skilled workers obtain a payoff higher (lower) than that they receive when they are not envied; ii) if the envy cost can be manipulated (increased or reduced), high-skilled workers can take actions of envy-provocation or envy-reduction to further increase their payoff.