Self-employment contributes to employment growth and innovativeness and many individuals want to become self-employed due to the autonomy and exibility it brings. Using "subjective well-being" as a broad summary measure that evaluates an individual's experience of being self-employed, the...

Does the COVID-19 pandemic cause people unhappy? In this study, we use a recent survey from China, Japan, South Korea, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States to explore this question. We find a relatively large effect: a one per-mille point increase in the incidence of the COVID-19...

This work investigates the impact that the change in the exposure to robots had on the Italian local employment dynamics over the period 2011-2018. A novel empirical strategy focusing on a match between occupations' activities and robots' applications at a high level of disaggregation makes it...

Purpose: This paper tries to identify the wage gap between informal and formal workers and tests for the two-tier structure of the informal labour market in Poland. Design/methodology/approach: I employ the propensity score matching (PSM) technique and use data from the Polish Labour Force...

We study the relationship between age and influence in a closed group of leading economists. We consider, as a measure of influence, monthly RePEc rankings and address the dynamics of rankings within the top group as a function of age. We find that the rankings peak at age 60 or 30 years after...

Concerns about the welfare of working children has over time produced a wide range of international and national interventions in the child labor market, culminating most recently in a commitment to eradicate the worst forms of child work via the attainment of target 8.7 of the Sustainable...

This study quantitatively assesses two alternative explanations for inter-industry wage differentials: worker heterogeneity in the formof unobserved quality and firmheterogeneity in the form of a firm's willingness to pay (WTP) for workers' productive attributes. We develop an empirical hedonic...

Adult education can mitigate the productivity decline in aging societies if older workers are willing to learn. We examine a generous partial retirement reform in Germany that led to a massive increase in early retirement. Using county-level administrative data on voluntary education activities,...

Using the Canadian Labour Force Survey, we document the short-term impact of COVID-19 on self-employed individuals in Canada, which we interpret as small business owners. We document an important decrease in business ownership between February 2020 and May 2020 (-14.8 percent for incorporated...

We exploit the variation in admission cutoffs across colleges at a leading Indian university to estimate the causal effects of enrolling in a selective college on cognitive attainment, economic preferences, and Big Five personality traits. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that...