This paper provides the first direct evidence on the determinants of link formation among immigrants in the host society. We use a purposely-designed survey on a representative sample of Sri Lankan immigrants living in Milan to study how migrants form social links among them and the extent to...

We explore the relationship between collaborations in writing papers and the academic productivity of economists and, particularly, we describe the magnitude and intensity of co-authorship among economists. To that end, we employ interaction maps from Complex Systems methods to study the global...

We study the role of social learning in the diffusion of cash crops in a resettled village economy in northeastern Brazil. We combine detailed geo-coded data on farming plots with dyadic data on social ties among settlers, and we leverage natural exogenous variation in network formation induced...

This paper focuses on the spatial variation in the uptake of social security benefits following a large and detrimental exogenous shock. Specifically, we focus on the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We construct a two-period panel of 66 Territorial...

This paper analyzes a bike-sharing service from both network efficiency and demand profiles perspectives. Specifically, it focuses on the BIZI service in the city of Zaragoza (Spain), which was launched in May 2008 with the aim of increasing the use of the bicycle in the city. Since then, the...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) scientists are challenged to create intelligent, autonomous agents that can make rational decisions. In this challenge, they confront two questions: what decision theory to follow and how to implement it in AI systems. This paper provides answers to these questions...

This paper considers the statistical analysis of large panel data sets where even afterconditioning on common observed effects the cross section units might remain dependentlydistributed. This could arise when the cross section units are subject to unobserved commoneffects and/or if there are...

We use panel data from the US Health and Retirement Study 1992-2002 to estimate theeffect of self-assessed health limitations on active labor market participation of men aroundretirement age. Self-assessments of health and functioning typically introduce anendogeneity bias when studying the...

We present a structural framework for the evaluation of public policies intended to increasejob search intensity. Most of the literature defines search intensity as a scalar that influencesthe arrival rate of job offers; here we treat it as the number of job applications that workerssend out....

We use a new and exceptionally rich administrative data set for Germany to evaluate theemployment effects of a variety of public sponsored training programs in the early 2000s.Building on the work of Sianesi (2003, 2004), we employ propensity score matching methodsin a dynamic, multiple...