This paper studies how portable skill accumulated in the labor market are. Using rich data ontasks performed in occupations, we propose the concept of task-specific human capital tomeasure the transferability of skills empirically. Our results on occupational mobility andwages show that labor...

In labor markets with worker and firm heterogeneity, the matching between firms and workersmay be assortative, meaning that the most productive workers and firms team up. Weinvestigate this with longitudinal population-wide matched employer-employee data fromPortugal...

This paper identifies several distortions which create barriers to entrepreneurship. First, inaddition to the innate entry cost, there are entry costs caused by regulation. Second, unionwage policies raise the opportunity cost of entrepreneurship...<BR>

To study whether current spending levels and public knowledge of them contribute to transatlantic differences in policy preferences, we implement parallel survey experiments in Germany and the United States. In both countries, support for increased education spending and teacher salaries falls...

We analyze the costs and benefits of using social image to foster virtuous behavior. A Principal seeks to motivate reputation-conscious agents to supply a public good. Each agent chooses how much to contribute based on his own mix of public-spiritedness, private signal about the value of the...

This paper develops a theory of the allocation of authority between two parties that produce impure public goods. We show that the optimal allocation depends on technological factors, the parties' valuations of the goods produced, and the degree of impurity of these goods. When the degree of...

We investigate the impact of community power on the practice of untouchability in rural India. We model two-dimensional simultaneous group conflict over social norms, wherein an upper and backward (OBC) caste Hindu bloc contests the 'scheduled' castes (SCs) over the extent to which behavioural...

In this article, we empirically study the survival of the ruling party in parliamentary democracies using a hazard rate model. We define survival of a crisis as being successful in a critical vote in the parliament. We develop a general probabilistic model of political crises and test it...

We evaluate the empirical relevance of de facto vs. de jure determinants of political power in the U.S. South between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. We apply a variety of estimation techniques to a previously unexploited dataset on voter registration by...

We empirically study the determinants of intra-household decision power with respect to economic and financial choices using a suitable direct measure provided in the 1989-2010 Bank of Italy Survey of Household Income and Wealth. Focusing on a sample of couples, we evaluate the effect of each...