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Discrimination and hostility in the workplace prevents homosexual workers from performing their core functions on the job. Moreover, it introduces unnecessary costs by increasing absenteeism, lowering productivity, and fostering a less motivated, less entrepreneurial, and less committed workforce. By means of an agent-based model, the authors simulated the effects on unemployment rates of an increasing of sexual orientation (SO) disclosure in the workplaces. The authors tested the effects on workers’ utility, level of job satisfaction and segregation. The results show a complessive improvement of the firms’ performances and a better job satisfaction for undeclared and homosexual workers and employers. With a homosexual employer, the authors can observe an increasing homosexual utility and firm profit, with a low decrease in undeclared utility. Instead, with an undeclared employer, the firm’s profit decreases but the total effect is positive. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

An agent-based model applied.

Effects of sexual disclosure on unemployment rates, job satisfaction, and job segregation.

The economic literature on SO and job satisfaction is very meager.

The purpose of this paper is to understand why the neo‐Thomist natural law approach to social economics does not represent a trustworthy epistemological reference for the current social economists but, rather, definitively belongs to the past history of economics.

The approach ventures beyond an epistemological, methodological, and historical analysis of the causes that led to the rediscovery of Thomism, its golden age, and its abandonment. The theoretical and practical contents of the neo‐Thomist natural law approach to social economics are also carefully examined in order to identify its originality.

From this study, it clearly emerges that the modern conception of economics as a value‐free and context‐independent science is due to historical facts and ideological convictions and not to evidence in nature. This study also demonstrates that the disappearance of the neo‐Thomist natural law approach from the social economics debate is basically attributable to political, scholarly, and ecclesiastical factors and not to the loss of scientific reliability.

The treatment of the neo‐Thomist school is deployed in general terms with special reference to the principal scholars, Taparelli, Liberatore, and Leo XIII. In order to focus on the paper's aim, the author has not explored the particularity of each neo‐Thomist author's thought.

The practical desirability is to always render economists more aware of the fact that the societal and ethical context significantly mattered and continues to matter in the elaboration process of the economic theories.

The novelty consists of the attempt to explain the theoretical and practical reasons that historically and currently determine the sharp separation between the neo‐Thomist natural approach tradition and the social economics theory.