We analyse empirically the effects of urbanization on Italian college graduates’ work possibilities as entrepreneurs three years after graduation. We find that doubling the province of work’s population density reduces the chances of being an entrepreneur by 2-3 percentage points. This...

E fficiency wages theories argue that the threat of ring, coupled with a high unemployment rate, is a mechanism that discourages employee shirking in asymmetric information contexts. Our empirical analysis aims to verify the role of unemployment as a worker discipline device, considering the...

This paper investigates labor supply and redistributive effects of in-work benefits for Italian married couples using a tax-benefit microsimulation model and a multi-sectoral discrete choice model of labor supply. We consider two in-work benefit schemes following the key principles of the Earned...

In Italy the participation of women has not increased very much in the last few decades relative to other developed countries and it is still among the lowest in Europe. The female employment rate stands almost 13 percent age points below the EU average and 22 below the Lisbon target. One of the...

In this paper we analyse data from the National Education Longitudinal Study to investigate whether experiencing parental divorce during adolescence has an adverse impact on students' performance on standardized tests. To account for the potential endogeneity of parental divorce we employ double...

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...

Recent research has focused on the consequences on the unilateral divorce laws on several aspects of individual behavior but the issue of children custody after divorce has been almost neglected. This paper studies the implications on mothers of the changes in child custody law from maternal...

Protectionist policies are often considered or even implemented as a reaction to increasing globalization. This is not new in history. This paper uses the introduction of import duties on sugar in the late nineteenth century Italy to measure the impact of protectionism on migration out flows at...

The aim of this research is to investigate the relationship between obesity and wages, using data for nine countries from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) over the period 1998-2001. We improve upon the existing literature by adopting an Instrumental Variable Quantile Regression...

This paper investigates the impact of the public smoking ban which came into eff ect in Italy on January 2005 on individual smoking behaviour. Current empirical evidence supports the existence of a negative eff ect of the Italian ban on smoking prevalence and consumption in the general...