This paper assesses the impact of the first wave of the pandemic on the local economies of one of the hardest-hit countries, Italy. We combine quarterly local labor market data with the new machine learning control method for counterfactual building. Our results document that the economic...

The main purpose of this study is to assess the impact of Brexit on the foreign direct investment (FDI) in the United Kingdom. As a novelty, compare to previous studies from the literature, the research focused on two proxies for FDI: FDI projects with the associated new and safeguarded jobs and...

This paper examines labour market matching in Austria since 2008, with a particular focus on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic at the regional and sectoral level. We use comprehensive monthly administrative data and apply a standard matching model to estimate Beveridge curves for different...

Despite hiring credits being a long-standing labor market policy, evidence of their impact at the firm level is limited. This paper contributes to the existing literature by providing an empirical analysis of an untargeted hiring credits policy introduced in Italy in 2015. We implement the...

Do investments in soft skills pay off in terms of student achievement? This paper evaluates a large private-sector program in this area, EPIS, based on individual and small-group sessions of mediators that seek to improve the non-cognitive skills (e.g. motivation, self-esteem, conscientiousness)...

We analyze the short- and long-term effects of the U.S. Vietnam-era military service on veterans' health outcomes using a restricted version of the National Health Interview Survey 1974-2013 and employing the draft lotteries as an instrumental variable (IV). We start by assessing whether the...

We use (donut) regression discontinuity design and difference-in-differences estimators to estimate the impact of a one-shot hiring subsidy targeted at low-educated unemployed youths during the Great Recession recovery in Belgium. The subsidy increases job-finding in the private sector by 10...

We examine the impact of increasing minimum wage on employment by exploiting variation in the age-dependent National Minimum Wage (NMW) in the UK. We extend the Regression Discontinuity model to evaluate the procyclicality of employment effect and show that previous estimates may be biased due...

This paper examines the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the returns to education in the United States. Using data from the Current Population Survey 2011-2022, the analysis reveals that, after a period of decline, returns to education increased significantly because of COVID, particularly...