In this paper, we study the role of coworker referrals for labor market outcomes. Using comprehensive Danish administrative data covering the period 1980 to 2005, we first document a strong tendency of workers to follow their former coworkers into the same establishments and provide evidence...

Child labor is often condemned as a form of exploitation. I explore how the notion of exploitation, as used in everyday language, can be made precise in economic models of child labor. Exploitation is defined relative to a specific social welfare function. I first show that under the standard...

This paper studies learning within organizations when incentives change. We use a simple principal-agent model to show how, in the presence of imperfect information over the shape of the production function, worker's effort choice changes over time as information is disclosed and processed. We...

In this paper we present a counterfactual evaluation of the effect of ICT resources at school on student achievements conducted in Italy. In 2009 156 classes at 6th grade were endowed with additional resources earmarked for purchasing ICT equipments only. By selecting an equivalent number of...

Understanding how variation in weather and climate conditions impact productivity, performance and learning is of crucial economic importance. Recently, studies have established that high temperatures negatively impact cognition and educational outcomes in several countries around the world. We...

A society is characterized by the common attitudes and behavior of its members. Such behavior reflects purposive decision making by individuals, given the environment they live in. Thus, as technology changes, so might social norms. There were big changes in social norms during the 20th century,...

This paper investigates the role that idiosyncratic uncertainty plays in shaping social preferences over the degree of labor market flexibility, in a general equilibrium model of dynamic labor demand where the productivity of firms evolves over time as a Geometric Brownian motion. A key result...

The traditional model of taste discrimination in labor markets presumes perfect substitution, making it unsuitable for the measurement of discrimination across job assignments. We extend the model to explain cross-assignment discrimination and test it on data from Major League Baseball. A...

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...

Macroeconomists have long been concerned with the causal effects of monetary policy. When the identification of causal effects is based on a selection-on-observables assumption, non-causality amounts to the conditional independence of outcomes and policy changes. This paper develops a...