We study some recent developments and challenges in the empirics of the effects of social networks. We focus in particular on researchers' ability to make policy recommendations based on a standard linear econometric model. We examine the potential compatibility between this type of econometric...

Retention of skilled workers is essential for labour-intensive organisations like hospitals, where an excessive turnover of doctors and nurses can reduce the quality and quantity of services to patients. In the public sector, where salaries are often not negotiable at individual level, workers...

We investigate the relationship among staff engagement, job complementarities and labour supply in the hospital sector, where excessive turnover of the clinical staff (doctors and nurses) can be detrimental for quality of care. We exploit a unique and rich panel dataset constructed by combining...

In Italy the reforms of the last twenty years shaped a dual labour market with different levels of employment protection for permanent jobs, on one side, and temporary jobs like apprenticeships and fixed-term contracts, on the other side. The main difference between apprentices and other types...

Many economists and educators favour public support for education on the premise that education improves the overall well-being of citizens. However, little is known about the causal pathways through which education shapes people's subjective well-being (SWB). This paper explores the direct and...

This paper studies differences in the motivation to be self-employed between rural migrants and urban residents in modern China. Estimates of the wage differential between self-employment and paid-employment obtained through a three-stage methodology using the 2002 China Household Income Project...

In this paper we consider nonparametric estimation of a structural equation model under full additivity constraint. We propose estimators for both the conditional mean and gradient which are consistent, asymptotically normal, oracle efficient and free from the curse of dimensionality. Monte...

The many facets of retirement have been studied widely by economists. However, the effect of retirement on marriage stability has been ignored in the literature. Retirement represents a dramatic change in individual time allocation that may affect marriage stability. In particular, individuals...

Does immigration accelerate sectoral change towards high-productivity sectors? This paper uses the mass displacement of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to West Germany after World War II as a natural experiment to study this question. A simple two-sector model of the economy, in which moving...

Spillovers of prosocial motivation are crucial for the formation of social capital. They facilitate interactions among individuals and create social multipliers that amplify the effects of policy interventions. We conducted a large-scale intervention study among dyads of blood donors to...