Are bans effective at lowering child labor and increasing school attendance and, if so, do these effects lead to positive outcomes later in life? This paper seeks to answer these questions by examining the effect of a 1998 Brazilian law that increased the minimum employment age from 14 to 16. To...

Traders in global markets operate at different local times-of-day. Suboptimal times-of-day may produce sleepiness due to daily variations in sleep/wake patterns and possibly also increased accumulation of hours awake. Global asset markets imply significantly increased heterogeneity in circadian...

This paper empirically examines the degree of persistence in four precious metal prices (i.e., gold, palladium, platinum, and silver) during the last four U.S. recessions. Unit root tests and fractional integration techniques suggest that gold still is the most prominent safe haven asset within...

We study the effects on financial markets and real economic activity of changes in risk related to political events and policy announcements in Italy during the 2013-2019 period that saw the rise to power of populist parties. We focus on events that have implications for budgetary policy, debt...

Starting from Professor Kornai´s assertion about the necessity to focus on the long-termperspectives of the transformation process, we analyze in this paper the Lisbon performanceof the countries of the European Union from such a long-term, structural perspective. Wepresent in a simple form the...

In an evaluation of a job-training program, the influence of the program on the individualearnings capacity is important, because it reflects the program effect on human capital.Estimating these effects is complicated because earnings are observed for employedindividuals only, and employment is...

In this paper we reevaluate the returns to education based on the increase in the compulsory schooling age from 14 to 15 in the UK in 1947. We provide a Bayesian fuzzy regression discontinuity approach to infer the effect on earnings for a subset of subjects who turned 14 in a narrow window...

Labor market programs may affect unemployed individuals' behavior before they enroll. Such ex ante effects may differ according to ethnic origin. We apply a novel method that relates self-reported perceived treatment rates and job search behavioral outcomes, such as the reservation wage or...

Abadie and Imbens (2008, Econometrica) showed that classical bootstrap schemes fail to provide correct inference for K-nearest neighbour (KNN) matching estimators of average causal effects. This is an interesting result showing that bootstrap should not be applied without theoretical...

This paper analyzes changes in wage differentials between white men and white women over the period 1993-2006 across the entire wage distribution using Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data. We decompose distributional changes in the gender wage gap to assess the contribution of observed...