Circular economy thinking has become the subject of academic enquiry across several disciplines recently. Yet whilst its technical and business angles are more widely discussed, its philosophical underpinnings and socioeconomic implications are insufficiently investigated. In this article, we aim to contribute to their understanding by uncovering the circular economy role in shaping a new vision, highlighting the social and economic dimensions of future imaginaries and the mechanisms that can enable them to bring about change in the social context. We believe that defining the vision that the circular economy is contributing to shape is key to explain its conceptual framework and activities. Drawing on the concept of fictional expectations, we uncover one of the plausible social dimensions inherent to the circular economy thinking thereby opening up a new perspective on the current debate in the circular economy literature wherein authors, by contrast, are emphasising the lack of an explicit social dimension. Fictional expectations are introduced to refer to those imaginaries of the future that can catalyse social action in the present and counteract societal addictions, in which modern society seems to be trapped. We show how a circular economy inspired vision can be instrumental to the emergence of a fictional expectation that can provide therapies to the current societal addiction of wasteful production and consumption systems. This philosophical background allows us to provide, in conclusion, a new conceptualisation of the circular economy as a cognitive framework instrumental to the emergence of a future imaginary.

The damage and the recurrence of financial crises have increased the concern of investors and policymakers on one hand and the interest of macroeconomists on the other. This paper presents an original non parametric methodology, whose aim is to give a very intuitive and rigorous method for variable selection in order to analyse financial crises. Transvariation analysis compares the distributions of two different groups of countries (sound and distressed) with respect to a single macroeconomic variable and selects the indicators on the basis of a low transvariation probability index. The current account deficit to GDP ratio, differently from other studies on financial crises, seems to be a suitable variable in discriminating distressed countries from sound ones, and the case of Argentina and Turkey confirms this finding.

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This paper investigates the demand for money by firms and the existence of economies of scales in order to evaluate the efficiency in the cash management of the Italian manufacturing industry. We estimate a money demand for cash elaborated by Fujiki and Mulligan (1996). Estimates differ from the previous literature firstly, because we use a choice dynamic model to overcome endogeneity problems in cash holdings; secondly, because we use an iterative procedure based on backward exclusion of firms from model estimation with which we point out the high heterogeneity of Italian companies in money demand. Our estimates show that the Italian Manufacturing industry, considered as whole, does not enjoy scale economies in money demand. Our iterative procedure points out that the cause of this result is to be ascribed to small firms which are characterized by thin cash money holdings and a consequently very modest opportunity cost. Once small size firms are removed from our data set our estimates reveal that money demand of medium and large size firms is different for high scale economies. This result, together with the fact that small firms' cash balances are thin, implies the efficiency of Italian manufacturing industry.