We examine the dynamics of post-merger organizational integration. Our basic question is whether there is evidence of conflict between employees from the two merging firms. Such conflict can arise for several reasons, including firm-specific human capital, corporate culture, power, or...

The firm's stock of human capital is an important determinant of its ability to innovate. As such, any increase in this stock through firm-sponsored training might lead to more innovation. We test this hypothesis using detailed data on firms' human capital investments and innovation performance,...

Recent literature has raised the attention on the estimation of time-invariant variables both in a static and a dynmamic framework. In this context, Hausman-Taylor type estimators have been applied, relying crucially on the distinction between exogenous and endogenous variables (in terms of...

The objective of this paper is to analyse the role of migrants in innovation in Europe. We use Total Factor Productivity as a measure of innovation and focus on the three largest European countries – France, Germany and the United Kingdom – in the years 1994-2007. Unlike previous research,...

Are some management practices akin to a technology that can explain company and national productivity, or do they simply reflect contingent management styles? We collect data on core management practices from over 11,000 firms in 34 countries. We find large cross-country differences in the...

We examine how the net worth of billionaires relates to their looks, as rated by 16 people of different gender and ethnicity. Surprisingly, their financial assets are unrelated to their beauty; nor are they related to their educational attainment. As a group, however, billionaires are both more...

Stochastic earnings frontiers have been used in a relatively small number of papers to analyse workers' ability to capture their full potential earnings in labour markets where there is inefficient job matching (due to lack of information, discrimination, over-education or during process of...

This paper explores the link between the presence of unions in the workplace, the adoption of decentralized labor agreements and technical efficiency, using a large sample of Italian manufacturing firms. We apply the Data Envelopment Analysis, and its robust version based on bootstrap theory, to...

We consider the problem of assessing the effects of a treatment on duration outcomes using data from a randomized evaluation with noncompliance. For such settings, we derive nonparametric sharp bounds for average and quantile treatment effects addressing three pervasive problems simultaneously:...

Econometric analyses in the happiness literature typically use subjective well-being (SWB) data to compare the mean of observed or latent happiness across samples. Recent critiques show that comparing the mean of ordinal data is only valid under strong assumptions that are usually rejected by...