When policymakers and private agents use models, the economists who design the model have an incentive to alter it in order to influence outcomes in a fashion consistent with their own preferences. I discuss some consequences of the existence of such ideological bias. In particular, I analyze...

Policy advice can help political actors design and implement institutional reforms through the generation of political and substantial legitimacy. This article clarifies the institutional pre-conditions of effective supply and transfer of policy advice with particular respect to the field of...

Arguably, one of the most important developments in the field of applied economics during the last decades has been the emergence of systematic policy evaluation, with its distinct focus on the establishment of causality. By contrast to the natural sciences, the objects of our scientific...

Using Italian data that includes both inflation forecasts of firms and external information on their balance sheets, we study the causal effect of changes in the dispersion of beliefs about future inflation on the misallocation of resources. We find that as disagreement increases, so does...

We develop a theoretically grounded extension of the two-way fixed effects model of Abowd et al. (1999) that allows firms to differ both in the wages they offer new hires and the wages required to poach their employees. Expected hiring wages are modeled as the sum of a worker fixed effect, a...

We use Italian municipality data on education and voter participation in national elections to estimate the effect of schooling on voter turnout. By adopting a fixed effect instrumental variable identification strategy, we find that education reduces voter turnout, more so in municipalities with...

A growing body of research has contributed to understanding the labor market and political effects of globalization. This paper explores an overlooked aspect of trade-induced adjustments in the labor market: the institutional aspect. We take advantage of the two-tier collective bargaining...

We provide novel evidence on the existence and the extent of intergenerational transmission of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education using a recent large administrative dataset of Italian graduates obtained from the Almalaurea data. Parental influence on two STEM...

This paper aims to study the shortcomings and merits of the first experiment of quasi-market in the provision of employment services: the Lombardy DUL (Dote Unica Lavoro). This system, which has inspired the 2015 national reform within the Jobs Act, has reactivated and revitalized the sector by...