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Purpose – To show that The Sensory Order is an original effort to support, on a neurophysiologic basis, methodological individualism.

Methodology/approach – Considering that the mind is a complex and self-organized order, Hayek criticizes methodological holism according to which the cause of action has to be sought outside the individual, in macro-laws governing social wholes. He argues that, due to the nature of the mind, the cause of action has to be sought inside the individual.

Findings – The paper stresses that scholars have more or less neglected a very important point in discussions of the Austrian author's psychology. Hayek's psychology supports the idea that the explanation of the action stems from the understanding of its meaning.

Research limitations/implications – The article only discusses some of the epistemological consequences of Hayek's theory of the mind. For instance, it does not analyze in a detailed way the relationship between this theory and the idea of distributed knowledge. It left an in-depth examination of this issue for subsequent research.

Originality/value of paper – Many authors state that Hayek's version of methodological individualism only examines the non-intentional effects of action, neglecting the importance of Verstehen. They argue that the Austrian scholar is not a complete and coherent champion of methodological individualism. The paper shows that this criticism is unfounded.

Purpose – Overview of Hayek's cognitive theory and the contributions of chapters.

Methodology/approach – Perspective on significance of Hayek's cognitive theory for the social sciences.

Findings – Hayek's cognitive theory provides insight into his oeuvre; more importantly, it is relevant for social theory in its own right.

Research limitations/implications – Hayek's cognitive theory warrants further attention by economists and social theorists interested in evolutionary social processes.

Originality/value of paper – To counter a widespread view that the contribution to economics and social science of Hayek's cognitive theory is largely confined to methodology. Hayek's cognitive theory also provides a useful framework for furthering the understanding of evolution within the social realm.

This chapter discusses the main research interests and outputs in the various branches of geography that have influenced the study of tourism from a geographical perspective. It argues that the idiographic tradition has been transversal throughout, leading to the growing interest for tourism within the geography academic community in the last 10 years. There is a focus on the birth of specific research groups, mainly related to a constellation of new university curricula on tourism and—with few exceptions of territorial tradition—to an intermittent availability of public research funds. The chapter concludes with a more general picture of the place of tourism within the geography discipline in Italy and of evolving trends in terms of research results, dissemination, and evaluation.

Traditional epidemic models, like the classical SIR, are fitted to real data using deterministic optimization techniques. As a consequence, their performances cannot be properly assessed and, more importantly, the estimates of the critical epidemic parameters (which are of dramatic importance in monitoring the epidemic evolution) cannot be complemented with the calculation of confidence intervals. The aim of the present work is to remove such limitations and to compare the results obtained using two stochastic versions of deterministic SIR models. We describe the two alternatives and the associated estimation procedures, and we apply the two methodologies to a set of COVID-19 data observed in Italy in the 2020 pandemic wave. Our estimates of the basic reproduction number are comparable with the official sources, but using our methods uncertainty can also be properly assessed.

The main aim of this paper is to examine labour productivity trends in Italy over the period 1981‐2004.

To this end, relying on recent developments in the analysis of non‐stationary dependent panels, the paper develops a new method for estimating total factor productivity (TFP) trends.

The conclusions confirm the view that the recent decline in Italian labour productivity growth is mostly due to a widespread fall in TFP growth.

The main assumption underlying the proposed TFP estimation method is that technology growth is driven by a single trend common to all units included in the panel (industries, regions or countries).

The paper provides two distinct contributions: empirically, it provides robust evidence that TFP slow‐down is the main cause of recent negative trends in labour productivity in Italy. Methodologically, the paper proposes an approach to estimating TFP that enjoys several advantages: only basic data for input and output flows are needed, the non‐stationary nature of the data is explicitly taken into account, and confidence intervals for TFP growth can be computed. This method can thus be easily applied to many routinely available datasets, to either corroborate existing growth accounting estimates or to obtain previously unavailable estimates.

Conferences bring scientists together and provide one of the most timely means for disseminating new ideas and cutting-edge works. The importance of conferences in many scientific areas is testified by quantitative indexes. The main goal of this paper is to investigate a novel research question: is there any correlation between the impact of scientific conferences and the venue where they took place?

To measure the impact of conferences, the authors conducted a large scale analysis on the bibliographic data extracted from 3,838 Computer Science conference series and over 2.5 million papers spanning more than 30 years of research. To quantify the “touristicity'' of a venue, the authors exploited indexes about the attractiveness of a venue from reports of the World Economic Forum, and have extracted four country-wide and two city-wide touristic indexes, which measure the attractiveness and the touristicity of any country or city.

The authors found out that the two aspects are related, and the correlation with conference impact is stronger when considering country-wide touristic indexes, achieving a correlation value of more than 0.5 when considering the average citations, and more than 0.8 when considering the total citations. Moreover the almost linear correlation with the Tourist Service Infrastructure index attests the specific importance of tourist/accommodation facilities in a given country.

There are two main limitations of this work: (1) the use of citations to evaluate the attractiveness of the conferences and (2) the difficulty to formally define the touristic attractiveness of a venue.

Starting from the results concerning the correlation between different touristicity indicators and the outcome of a conference in terms of citations, it would be possible to support conference organizers in their decisions. For instance, they could plan in advance conference venues considering the same touristicity indicators, comparing different options and selecting cities which have high scores. This will allow for rapid planning of a conference venue, encompassing the easiness of travel and the attractivity of a venue, hence increasing the potential outcomes of the conference.

Regarding the social implications, this study will enable the possibility for municipalities and conference organizers to understand what it can be improved in a specific venue to make it more attractive. This may include better transport connections or selecting cities which show a high potential regarding the touristicity index. Regarding the willingness of a researcher to submit a paper to a specific conference, it would be unaltered, meaning that what the results show is that there is already a mental process, before submitting a paper to a conference, which considers these indicators.

This is the first attempt to focus on the relationship of venue characteristics to conference papers. The results open up new possibilities, such as supporting conference organizers in their organization efforts.

This work aims to study the break-even inflation rates (BEIRs), a widely used market-based measure of expected inflation. The authors focus on Italian Government bonds, one of the most liquid debt markets in the euro area.

The authors set up an auto-regressive distributed lag model and regress the BEIR on a set of variables that proxy inflation, market risk aversion, protection against deflation, credit as well as liquidity risk to get some insights into the importance of these factors. Subsequently, to disentangle market participants’ inflation expectations from their associated risk premia, the authors estimate a term structure model for the joint pricing of the Italian Government’s nominal and real yield curves, considering also a credit and a liquidity pricing factor.

The results show that BEIRs could be a misleading measure of the expected inflation due to the importance of the inflation risk premium and the credit risk effect. According to the estimates, the decrease of market-based measures of inflation observed in the last part of the sample period seems to reflect a lowering of both inflation expectations and risk premia. Inflation premia co-move with a measure of the tail risk of the long-term inflation distribution, signalling that investors become more concerned with downside risks.

This study complements the existing literature primarily based on the USA and euro area data focusing on the Italian market. To this end, the authors modify and adapt a well-known term structure model developed for nominal and real curves.