Contracting out public services to private firms has ambiguous effects when quality is imperfectly observable. Using a randomized experiment over a national sample in France, we compare the efficiency of the public employment service (PES) vs. private providers in delivering very similar...

In this paper we discuss how the "encouragement design" used in randomized controlled trials can be extended to a setting with two treatments and one control group. Conditions to interpret the Two-Stage Least Squares (TSLS) estimates causally are stronger than in the case with only one treatment...

This study evaluates the effect of ethnic identity on the employment level of immigrants in Greece. Treating ethnic identity as a composite of key cultural elements the estimations suggest that employment is positively associated with assimilation and integration and negatively associated with...

Language is a strong and robust determinant of international trade patterns: Countries sharing a common language trade significantly more with each other than countries using different languages, holding other factors constant. In this paper, we show that this trade-promoting effect of language...

We investigate whether time-persistent cultural borders impede economic exchange across regions of the same country. To measure cultural differences we evaluate, for the first time in economics, linguistic micro-data about phonological and grammatical features of German dialects. These data are...

This study investigates the impact of ethnic identity on Albanian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Georgian, and Russian wages in Greece. Treating ethnic identity as a composite of language, cultural habits, ethnic-self identification, societal interaction, and future citizenship plans, the estimations...