Consider legal uncertainty as uncertainty about the legality of a specific action. In particular, suppose that the threshold of legality is uncertain. I show that this legal uncertainty raises welfare. Legal uncertainty changes deterrence in opposite directions. The probability of conviction...

Adding to the literature on the effects of government decentralization, this paper uses a large sample of individual responses from more than a hundred countries about public’s perceptions of government’s performance along various dimensions to study the relative influences of different...

We quantify the prevalence of undisclosed influencer posts on Twitter across a large set of brands based on a unique data set of over 100 million posts. We develop a novel method to detect undisclosed influencer posts and find that 96% of influencer posts are not disclosed as such. Despite...

Daylight Saving Time (DST) is currently implemented by more than seventy countries, yet we do not have a clear knowledge of how it affects individuals' welfare. Using a regression discontinuity design combined with a differences-in-differences approach, we find that the Spring DST causes a...

Daylight Saving Time (DST) is currently implemented by more than seventy countries, yet we do not have a clear knowledge of how it affects individuals’ welfare. Using a regression discontinuity design combined with a differences-in-differences approach, we find that the Spring DST causes a...

We model consumer choices for cannabis in a risky environment and determine the supply of cannabis under prohibition and legalization. While introducing a legal market reduces the profits of illegal providers, it increases cannabis consumption. We show that this trade-off can be overcome by...

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

Firms may underinvest in local environmental protection even from the private viewpoint of its owners and employees, but works councils may help mitigate this problem. We show that increases in environmental investments when councils are present could be employee-led, firm-led, or jointly-led....

We model consumer choices for cannabis in a risky environment and determine the supply of cannabis under prohibition and legalization. While introducing a legal market reduces the profits of illegal providers, it increases cannabis consumption. We show that this trade-off can be overcome by...

We study the nature of peer effects in the market for new cell phones. Our analysis builds on de-identified data from Facebook that combine information on social networks with information on users’ cell phone models. To identify peer effects, we use variation in friends’ new phone...