In 2000 Italy replaced its traditional system of severance pay for public employees with a new system. Under the old regime, severance pay was proportional to the final salary before retirement; under the new regime it is proportional to lifetime earnings. This reform entails substantial losses...

Through a field experiment in Sri Lanka I analyze the role of experimentally-induced memories of 2004 tsunami on behavior in a trust game in which personal notions of cheating are elicited. Microfinance borrowers were randomly assigned to a treatment (control) group consisting in watching a...

We present evidence on how the requirement to attend health and nutrition sessions affects the health behaviour of adults living in households targeted by a nutritional programme in rural Mexico. The evaluation sample of the Programa de Apoyo Alimentario (PAL) is unique in having four different...

Natural disasters have been shown to produce effects on social capital, risk and time preferences of victims. We run experiments on altruistic preferences on a sample of Sri Lankan microfinance borrowers affected/unaffected by the tsunami shock in 2004 at a 7-year distance from the event (a...

In a world where some consumers are not self-interested and the action of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) reveals information, the price of a good produced by a multinational enterprise and the latter's relocation and production decisions depend on labor standards. We study the effect of...

This study designs a laboratory experiment to investigate the link between personal responsibility and individual preferences for redistribution. We contribute to the literature by considering two key insights: first, effort is costly; second, its fruits can be grasped only in the future....

We consider a model of occupational choice with credit market imperfections and local non convexities in education investment. The implications of individual heterogeneity for the evolution of wealth distribution and policies are studied. Convergence of the wealth distribution is obtained...

In the presence of transactions costs, no matter how small, arbitrage activity does not necessarily render equal all riskless rates of return. When two such rates follow stochastic processes, it is not optimal immediately to arbitrage out any discrepancy that arises between them. The reason is...

The theoretical literature suggests that taxation can have a large impact on household portfolio selection and allocation. In this paper we consider the tax treatment of life insurance, considering the cancellation of tax incentives in Italian life insurance contracts for investors with high...

This paper derives and estimates a model where durable and non-durable consumption are allowed to be non-separable in utility and individuals face a convex adjustment cost whenever they want to purchase a new durable good. Subjective expectations data allow to identify and estimate the marginal...