We analyse the determinants of school attendance and hours worked by children in Pakistan and Nicaragua. On the basis of a theoretical model of children's labour supply, we simultaneously estimate the school attendance decision and the hours worked by Full Model Maximum Likelihood. We analyse...

We examine access to general practitioners, public and private specialists in Italy. We develop a novel model using finite mixtures of probit models that provides a rich and flexible functional form. The mixed distribution is flexible and can accommodate non-normality of response probabilities....

We study competition in capital markets subject to moral hazard when investors cannot prevent side trading. Perfect competition is impeded by entrepreneurs’ threat to borrow excessively from multiple lenders and to shirk. As a consequence, investors earn positive rents at equilibrium. We then...

We derive a theoretical model of effort in the presence of career concern based on the multi-unit all-pay auction, and closely inspired by the Italian academic market. In this model, the number of applicants, the number of new posts, and the relative importance of the determinants of promotion...

We study here the problem of evaluating whether the selection from a set is close to the ranking determined by a measurable criterion. We propose a number of natural axioms and show that an index exists that satisfies all these axioms. The paper ends with an application of the index to Italian...

Structural change affects the estimation of economic signals, like the underlying growth rate or the seasonally adjusted series. An important issue, which has attracted a great deal of attention also in the seasonal adjustment literature, is its detection by an expert procedure. The...

This paper presents a somewhat novel approach to explore the economic contribution of ecosystems. It develops linked models to capture connections between resource stocks and flows and the resulting micro and macroeconomic impacts. A bioeconomic model is developed that is imbedded into a...

This paper shows that having access to a fast Internet connection is an important determinant of capitalization effects in property markets. We combine microdata on property prices in England between 1995 and 2010 with local availability of Internet broadband connections. Rich variation in...

We derive bounds for the average of math and language scores of elementary school students in Italy correcting for pervasive score manipulation. Information on the fraction of manipulated data is retrieved from a natural experiment that randomly assigns external monitors to schools. We show how...

Background: The financial burden for EU health systems associated with cardiovascular disease has been estimated to be nearly € 110 billion in 2006, corresponding to 10% of total healthcare expenditure across EU or a mean € 223 annual cost per capita. The main purpose of this study is to...