We examine the empirical relationship between immigration and crime across Italian provinces during the period 1990-2003. Drawing on police administrative records, we first document that the size of the immigrant population is positively correlated with the incidence of property crimes and with...

We analyze bubbles and crashes in a model in which some investors are partially sophisticated. While the expectations of such investors are endogenously determined in equilibrium, these are based on a coarse understanding of the market dynamics. We highlight how such investors may endogenously...

We build a simple model of self-selection into migration and immigration policy determination. We first show that the effect of any immigration policy can be decomposed into a size and a composition effect. We then explore how the optimal policy may change once the latter effect is considered.

In this paper, we formalize the view that economic development requires high rates of productive entrepreneurship, and this requires an efficient matching between entrepreneurial talent and production technologies. We first explore the role of financial development in promoting such efficient...

We explore which financial constraints matter the most in the choice of becoming an entrepreneur. We consider a randomly assigned welfare program in rural Mexico and show that cash transfers signi cantly increase entry into entrepreneurship. We then exploit the cross-household variation in the...

This paper shows that utility differences between the self-employed and employees increase with financial development. This effect is not explained by increased profits but by an increased value of non- monetary benefits, in particular job independence. We interpret these findings by building a...