We randomly assign student profiles to teachers and elicit teachers' beliefs about the student's likelihood of success in alternative high school tracks. We document a large and statistically significant gradient in teachers' beliefs about students' high school prospects with respect to...

We study whether the combined significant reduction in the pupil-teacher ratio and increase in parental education observed in Italy between the end of World War II and the end of the 1980s have had a significant impact on the educational attainment and the labor market returns of a...

We analyse an equilibrium labour market with on-the-job search and experience effects (where workers learn-by-doing). The analysis yields a standard Mincer wage equation with worker fixed effects and endogenously determined firm fixed effects. It shows that learning-by-doing increases...

We model individual careers in sports and games from initial entry to eventual exit or success as a discrete-choice, finite-horizon optimization problem. We apply this model to the international game of chess and study cross-country differences in the relative success of players. While we find...

This paper revisits the no-recall assumption in job search models with take-it-or-leave-it offers. Workers who can recall previously encountered potential employers in order to engage them in Bertrand bidding have a distinct advantage over workers without such attachments. Firms account for this...

We provide the first estimates of the impact of managers' risk preferences on their training allocation decisions. Our conceptual framework links managers' risk preferences to firms' training decisions through the bonuses they expect to receive. Risk-averse managers are expected to select...

We analyze workers' risk preferences and training investments. Our conceptual framework differentiates between the investment risk and insurance mechanisms underpinning training decisions. Investment risk leads risk-averse workers to train less; they undertake more training if it insures them...

Using a representative sample of European firms, we study whether and to what extent financing constraints affect employers' decision to invest in employee training. We combine survey data on investment activities with administrative data on financial statements to develop an index of financing...

We estimate the effect of the high school curriculum (or track) on the returns to college using data from the Italian PLUS (Participation Labour and Unemployment Survey) survey. We find that college graduates with vocational high school are less likely to be employed than graduates with academic...

Individual absolute risk aversion is measured for a sample of 1373 male household heads, using the 1995 wave of the Survey on the Income and Wealth of Italian households. This measure, conditional on financial and real wealth and household income, is used as an instrument for attained education...