Fabrizio Germano

The project proposes to study phenomena of cooperation, trust, inequality, mobility and fragility of societies using a novel framework developed in Germano and Demetrius (2014) that draws on a theory taken from physics and biology, transposed to the long-run study of macro-economies. The main focus of the project is on studying more in detail both the theoretical and empirical implications of the framework developed. Given the subject matter, the project is centered in economics but naturally relates to several other social sciences such as sociology, anthropology, political science and history. An important contribution of the theory developed and even more so of the project proposed is that it connects a variety of different aspects and quantitative measures of social interaction such as notions of cooperation, trust, social capital, inequality and mobility, which are fundamental indicators on the functionality of societies and naturally also play an important role across academic disciplines. The project aims to study and relate these different concepts to one other both theoretically and empirically, using the basic framework of Germano and Demetrius (2014) as a starting point. AMSE-IMéRA seems to be an ideal place to study these issues, given the expertise of the AMSE precisely on the topics of study, and given the interests and interdisciplinary environment at IMéRA.