Exploiting recent concentration of flight patterns under a new Federal Aviation Administration policy (called NextGen), we examine the impact of exposure to excessive noise levels on birth outcomes. Using birth records that include mothers' home addresses to measure airport proximity, we find...

In this paper I review the empirical evidence on the effects of incarceration on thesubsequent employment and earnings of less-educated young prisoners...

This paper estimates a structural model of the employment decision of the firm. Ourestablishment level data displays an extreme degree of rigidity in that employment levels arelargely constant throughout our sample...

We study the effects of liquidity constraints and start-up costs on the relationship betweenwealth and the fraction of entrepreneurs in an economy. We develop a dynamic occupationalchoice model with endogenous wealth and entry into entrepreneurship...

In a perfect labor market severance payments can have no real effects as they can beundone by a properly designed labor contract (Lazear 1990). We give empirical content tothis proposition by estimating the effects of EPL on entry wages and on the tenure-wageprofile in a quasi-experimental...

We study how the political cost of enforcing a lockdown in response to the COVID- 19 outbreak relates to citizens' propensity for altruistic punishment in Italy, the early epicenter of the pandemic. Approval for the government's management of the crisis decreases with the amount of the penalties...

Previous studies report a range of estimates for the response of female labor supply and childcare attendance to childcare prices. We shed new light on these questions using a policy reform that raises the price of public daycare. After the reform, children are 8 percentage points less likely to...

The Mortensen-Pissarides model with unemployment benefits and taxes has been able to account for the variation in unemployment rates across countries but does not explain why geographical mobility is very low in some countries (on average, three times lower in Europe than in the U.S.). We build...

Irregular migrants from Africa and the Middle East flow into Europe along land and sea routes under the control of human smugglers. The demise of the Gaddafi regime in 2011 marked the opening of the Central Mediterranean Route for irregular border - crossing between Libya and Italy. This...

The private return to postsecondary investment varies widely by field, but the resources required by different fields are not well known. This paper establishes five new facts about college costs using novel department-level data. First, costs vary widely across field, ranging from electrical...