Household credit, especially for mortgages, has doubled over the past years in the new European Union member countries, raising concerns about the economic and social consequences of household indebtedness in the event of a macroeconomic crisis. Using household survey data for 2005, 2006, and...

It is often argued that a mandatory minimum wage is binding only if the wage density displays a spike at it. In this paper we analyze a model with search frictions and heterogeneous production technologies, in which imposition of a minimum wage affects wages even though, after imposition, the...

We propose a spatial search-matching model where both job creation and job destruction are endogenous. Workers are ex ante identical but not ex post since their job can be hit by a technological shock, which decreases their productivity. They reside in a city and commuting to the job center...

We show how small initial wealth differences between low skilled black and white workers can generate large differences in their labor-market outcomes. This even occurs in the absence of a taste for discrimination against blacks or exogenous differences in the distance to jobs. Because of the...

Reduced-form tests of scale effects in markets with search, run when aggregate matching functions are estimated, may miss important scale effects at the micro level, because of the reactions of job searchers. A semi-structural model is developed and estimated on a British sample, testing for...

We analyze a model of directed search in which unemployed job seekers observe all posted wages. We allow for the possibility of multiple applications by workers and ex post competition among vacancies. For any number of applications, there is a unique symmetric equilibrium in which vacancies...

We report the results of a laboratory experiment testing for the existence of loss aversion in a standard risk aversion protocol (Holt and Laury, 2002). In our experiment, participants earn and retain money for a week before using it in an incentivized risk preference elicitation task. We find...

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...

The standard model of intertemporal choice assumes risk neutrality toward the length of life: due to additivity, agents are not sensitive to a mean preserving spread in the length of life. Using a survey fielded in the RAND American Life Panel (ALP), this paper provides empirical evidence on...

We estimate the relationship between international youth and professional tennis rankings. We find no difference between the predictiveness of rankings from age 14 & Under versus age 16 & Under competitions. The most persistent predictor of professional success is beating older top ranked...