This paper investigates the impact of Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs on crime. Making use of a unique dataset combining detailed school characteristics with time and geo-referenced crime information from the city of São Paulo, Brazil, we estimate the contemporaneous effect of the...

We present a model of wage contract violation that implies a possibility of multiple equilibria in the level of arrears. Positive feedback arises because each employer's arrears affect the costs of late payment faced by other employers operating in the same labor market, resulting in a network...

Field evidence suggests that people belonging to the same group often behave similarly, i.e., behaviour exhibits social interaction effects. We conduct an experiment that avoids the identification problem present in the field. Our novel design feature is that each subject simultaneously is a...

We present a model of neighborhood effects in wage payment delays. Positive feedback arises because each employer’s arrears affect the late payment costs faced by other firms in the same local labor market, resulting in a strategic complementarity in the practice. The model is estimated on...

This paper aims to identify the causal effect of schooling on youth crime. To identify the causal effect, I use the policy interventions that occurred after the Kobe earthquake that hit Japan in 1995 as a natural experiment inducing exogenous variation in schooling. Based on a comparison of the...

We develop a model where the decision to commit a crime in a neighboring area is a positive function of the percentage of same-race individuals residing in that area since they can provide crucial information on crime possibilities. The model then predicts a positive spatial correlation in crime...

This paper presents the first empirical assessment of the causal relationship between social capital and health in Italy. The analysis draws on the 2000 wave of the Multipurpose Survey on Household conducted by the Italian Institute of Statistics on a representative sample of the population (n =...

This paper estimates the health returns to education, using data on identical twins. I adopt a twin-differences strategy in order to obtain estimates that are not biased by unobserved family background and genetic traits that may affect both education and health. I further investigate to what...

In this paper we use a new data set describing households with and without twin children in China to quantify the trade-off between the quality and quantity of children using the incidence of twins that for the first time takes into account effects associated with the lower birthweight and...

We find that second-generation effects of in utero and early childhood malnutrition on the school participation of the offspring of mothers who experienced the China Great Leap Forward Famine. The direct impact on entrance to senior high school is also negative, but smaller in magnitude than...