We identify the causal effect of teacher qualifications on parents' investments in their children. Exploiting a unique, high-stakes educational setting in which teachers are randomly assigned to classes, we show that parents react to more qualified teachers by increasing their financial...

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...

We use the variation of training policy over time and across Italian regions to identify the relationship between individual training and earnings. Using longitudinal data for the period 1999 to 2005, we find that the marginal effect of one additional week of formal training on monthly earnings...

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...

This paper studies how schooling admission tests affect economic performance in an economy where individuals are endowed with both academic and non academic abilities and both abilities matter for labor productivity. We develop a simple model with selective government held schools, where...

We develop a simple search equilibrium model of workplace training and education based on two features. First, investment in education improves job-related learning skills and reduces training costs burdened by firms. Second, firms with vacant skilled job slots can choose between recruitment...

The purpose of this paper is to provide an update of the empirical evidence on the private returns to education in Italy. First, we show that, whilst returns to education in Italy (based on gross wages) are in line with the European average, educational attainment is generally much lower...

We ask whether local agglomeration affects how recessions impact on entrepreneurship by comparing the probability of being an entrepreneur before and after the Great 2008 Recession in local labour markets where industrial districts are present and in comparable areas. Using Italian Labour Force...

Risk averse investors have to be compensated in higher expected returns when facing investments with higher risk. Education is an important investment therefore we use the results for 16 countries to test the positive relationship between return to education and the risk involved in this...