Common measures of cultural attitudes, such as those constructed from the World Values Survey, are characterized by substantial within-country volatility. This volatility is at odds with the notion of culture adopted in economics: a set of slow-moving traits that determine preferences and...

I study the causal pathways that link prison work programs to convict rehabilitation, leveraging administrative data from Italy and combining quasi-experimental and structural econometric methods to achieve both a credible identification and the isolation of mechanisms. Due to competing...

Exploiting admission thresholds in a Regression Discontinuity Design, we study the causal effects of daycare at age 0–2 on cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes at age 8–14. One additional month in daycare reduces IQ by 0.5% (4.5% of a standard deviation). Effects for conscientiousness are...

In RD designs with multiple cutoffs, the identification of an average causal effect across cutoffs may be problematic if a marginally exposed subject is located exactly at each cutoff. This occurs whenever a fixed number of treatment slots is allocated starting from the subject with the highest...

We provide first-pass evidence that the legalization of the cannabis market across US states may be inducing a crime drop. Exploiting the recent staggered legalization enacted by the adjacent states of Washington (end of 2012) and Oregon (end of 2014) we find, combining county-level...

Finding a job requires effective search skills to engage successfully with employers with vacancies. In a field experiment, we test a website that supplements such search skills by providing editable resume and cover letter templates as well as tips on how to look and apply for jobs. Exposure to...

Working-age grandparents supply large amounts of child care, an observation that raises the question of how having grandchildren affects grandparents' own labor supply. Exploiting the unique genealogical design of the PSID and the random variation in the timing when the parents of first-born...