This paper investigates the intergenerational effect of communication barriers on child health at birth using a natural experiment in Switzerland. We leverage the fact that refugees arriving in Switzerland originate from places that have large shares of French (or Italian) speakers for...

This paper represents one of the first attempts at building a direct measure of occupational exposure to robotic labour-saving technologies. After identifying robotic and LS robotic patents retrieved by Montobbio et al. (2022), the underlying 4-digit CPC definitions are employed in order to...

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...

Economic preferences are important for lifetime outcomes such as educational achievements, health status, or labor market success. We present a holistic view of how economic preferences are related within families. In an experiment with 544 families (and 1,999 individuals) from rural Bangladesh...

Technological advancements bring changes to our life, altering our behaviors as well as our role in the economy. In this paper, we examine the potential effect of the rise of robotic technology on health. The results of the analysis suggest that higher penetration of industrial robots in the...

We use data from 14 European countries and provide evidence that the fall in prices of information and communication technologies (ICT) is associated with a significant increase in the share of employees who work from home. Similar results hold within age, gender, and occupation groups. There...

This paper, relying on a still relatively unexplored long-term dataset on U.S. patenting activity, provides empirical evidence on the history of labour-saving innovations back to early 19th century. The identification of mechanisation/automation heuristics, retrieved via textual content analysis...

This paper studies the occupational selection among generations of immigrants in the United States and links their choices to the occupational wage distribution in their country of origin. The empirical results suggest that individuals are more likely to take up an occupation in the US that was...