Hosting the Olympic Games costs billions of taxpayer dollars. Following a quasi- experimental setting, this paper assesses the intangible impact of the London 2012 Olympics, using a novel panel of 26,000 residents in London, Paris, and Berlin during the summers of 2011, 2012, and 2013. We show...

We study the link between family violence and the emotional cues associated with wins and losses by local professional football teams. We hypothesize that the risk of violence is affected by the 'gain-loss' utility of game outcomes around a rationally expected reference point. Our empirical...

This paper examines the issue of whether workers learn productive skills from their co-workers, even if those skills are unethical. Specifically, we estimate whether Jose Canseco, one of the best baseball players in the last few decades, affected the performance of his teammates. In his...

In democratic societies individual attitudes of voters represent the foundations of policy making. We start by analyzing patterns in public opinion on migration and find that, across countries of different income levels, only a small minority of voters favour more open migration policies. Next...

With the use of comparable data from seven West African capitals, we attempt to assess the rationale behind development policies targeting high rates of school enrolment through the prism of allocation of labour and returns to skills across the formal and informal sectors. We find that people...

The "Easterlin paradox" suggests that there is no link between a society's economic development and its average level of happiness. We re-assess this paradox analyzing multiple rich datasets spanning many decades. Using recent data on a broader array of countries, we establish a clear positive...

Science rests upon the reliability of peer review. This paper suggests a way to test for bias. It is able to avoid the fallacy - one seen in the popular press and the research literature - that to measure discrimination it is sufficient to study averages within two populations. The paper's...