The intergenerational elasticity of income is considered one of the best measures of the degree to which a society gives equal opportunity to its members. While much research has been devoted to measuring this reduced-form parameter, less is known about its underlying structural determinants....

Gender Based Taxation (GBT) satisfies Ramsey´s optimal criterion by taxing less the moreelastic labor supply of (married) women. This holds when different elasticities between menand women are taken as exogenous and primitive...

In many European countries, wages are determined by collective bargaining agreements intended to improve wages and reduce inequality. We study the local and aggregate effects of collective bargaining in Italy and Germany. The two countries have similar geographical differences in firm...

In most Western countries illness-related absenteeism is higher among female workers than among male workers. Using the personnel dataset of a large Italian bank, we show that the probability of an absence due to illness increases for females, relative to males, approximately 28 days after a...

We use firm closure data from social security records for Austria 1978-1998 to investigate theeffect of age on employment prospects. We rely on exact matching to compare workersdisplaced due to firm closure with similar non-displaced workers. We then use a differencein-difference strategy to...

In RD designs with multiple cutoffs, the identification of an average causal effect across cutoffs may be problematic if a marginally exposed subject is located exactly at each cutoff. This occurs whenever a fixed number of treatment slots is allocated starting from the subject with the highest...

We exploit rules of class formation to identify the causal effect of increasing the number of immigrants in a classroom on natives test scores, keeping class size constant (Pure Composition Effect). We explain why this is a relevant policy parameter although it has been neglected so far. We show...

Migration may cause not only a brain drain but also a civicness drain, leading to an uncivicness trap. We study this possibility using college choices of southern-Italian students classified as Civic if not cheating in a die-roll experiment. Local civicness is the fraction of Civic in their...

We show that task juggling, i.e., the spreading of effort across too many active projects, decreases the performance of workers, raising the chances of low throughput, long duration of projects and exploding backlogs. Individual speed of job completion cannot be explained only in terms of...

We investigate whether the costs of job displacement differ between blue collar and white collar workers. In the short run earnings and employment losses are substantial for both groups but stronger for white collar workers. In the long run, there are only weak effects for blue collar workers...