The life satisfaction literature generally focuses on how life events affect subjective well-being. Through a contingent valuation survey we test whether well-being preferences have significant impact on life satisfaction. A sample of respondents is asked to simulate a policymaker decision...

The productive and allocative theories predict that education has positive impact on health: the more educated adopt healthier life styles and use more efficiently health inputs and this explains why they live longer. We find partial support for these theories with an econometric analysis on a...

We examine by means of an artefactual field experiment on a representative sample of Italian adults, the impact of information and belief elicitation on charitable-giving when donors know (or express their beliefs on) what the organizations received in terms of aggregate donations in the past....

The bulk of Information and Communication Technology is made of weightless, implementable and infinitely reproducible knowledge products (such as software and databases). These products are transferred by telephone lines, accessed through internet hosts and processed and exchanged through...

We experimentally study the effect of financial education on investment attitudes in a large sample of high school students in Italy. Students in the treated classes were taught a course in finance and interviewed before and after the study, while controls were only interviewed. Our principal...

We device a randomized experiment with task performance in which players directly decide allocation criteria (with/without) veil of ignorance on payoff distribution under different criteria in a stakeholder/spectator position. Our main result is a strong and significant gender effect: women...

We document that being spectators (no effect on personal payoffs) and, to a lesser extent, stakeholders without information on relative payoffs, induces subjects who can choose distribution criteria after task performance to prefer rewarding talent (vis à vis effort, chance or strict...

We investigate factors affecting happiness on a sample of Italian secondary school students. We find that money matters since family’s house ownership, mortgages and (class) relative wealth significantly affect life satisfaction. Other crucial factors are geographical residence (those living...

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

The paper investigates the determinants of bankruptcy in three representative unbalanced samples of Italian firms for the periods 1989-1991, 1992-94 and 1995-97. Two important results are that: i) the degree of relative firm inefficiency measured as the distance from the efficient frontier has...