We investigate the role of fatigue in soccer (football). Although this issue is important for the "productivity" of players and the optimal organization of national and international championships, empirical evidence is lacking. We use data on all the matches played by national teams in all the...

Social pressure may have relevant consequences in many contexts but it is hard to evaluate it empirically. In this paper we exploit a natural experiment in soccer to provide clear evidence of its effects. We aim to study how social pressure from the crowd in a stadium affects both players and...

Using data on about 35,000 professional tennis matches, we test whether men and women react differently to psychological pressure arising from the outcomes of sequential stages in a competition. We show that, with respect to males, females losing the first set are much more likely to play poorly...

We conducted a field experiment involving 720 Italian undergraduate students to investigate the existence of gender differences in performance in competitive settings and whether performance is affected by one's opponent gender. The experimental design was aimed at disentangling gender...

Procrastination produces harmful effects for human capital investments and studying activities. Using data from a large sample of Italian undergraduates, we measure procrastination with the actual behaviour of students, considering the delay in finalizing their university enrolment procedure. We...

We investigate to what extent crowd support contributes to the home advantage in soccer, disentangling this effect from other mechanisms such as players' familiarity with the stadium and travel fatigue. To evaluate the relevance of crowd support in determining home advantage we analyze...

We investigate whether and how social ties affect performance in teams by implementing a field experiment in which a sample of undergraduate students are randomly assigned to either teams composed by friends or teams composed by individuals not linked by friendship relationships. Students...

Efficiency wages theories argue that the threat of firing, coupled with a high unemployment rate, is a mechanism that discourages employee shirking in asymmetric information contexts. Our empirical analysis aims to test the role of unemployment as a worker discipline device, considering the...

Immigration has increasingly taken centre-stage in the political landscape. Part of this has been rise in far-right, anti-immigration parties in a range of countries. Existing evidence suggests that the presence of immigrants has a substantial effect on the political views of the electorate,...