This paper evaluates the effect of smoking bans in public places on the exposure to tobacco smoke of non-smokers and contrasts it with the effect of excise taxes. Exploiting data on cotinine - a metabolite of nicotine - as well as state and time variation in anti-smoking policies across US...

This paper investigates a unique feature of the English educational system to estimate the causal effect of compulsory schooling on labour market outcomes. We examine school leaving rules that allow for discrete variation in exit dates by date of birth within school cohorts. This natural...

We consider cross-sectional data that exhibit no spatial correla- tion, but are feared to be spatially dependent. We demonstrate that a spatial version of the stochastic volatility model of nancial econometrics, entailing a form of spatial autoregression, can explain such behaviour. The...

We utilize the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (1964) mechanism to estimate the willingness to pay for clean drinking water technology in northern Ghana. The BDM mechanism has attractive properties for empirical research, allowing us to directly estimate demand, compute heterogeneous treatment effects,...

The distribution of wealth is widening in many countries and with it the importance of inherited wealth. In 1974 a Labour Government came to power in the United Kingdom committed to introducing an annual wealth tax. It left office without doing so. Using the official archives of the time and...

This paper considers the impact of taxation policy on market work. On the basis of the evidence, we find that a 10 percentage point rise in the tax wedge will reduce overall labour input provided via the market by around 2 per cent of the population of working age. The tax wedge is the sum of...

We explore the impact of central government grants on local house prices in England using a panel data set of local authorities (LAs) from 2001 to 2008. Electoral targeting of grants to LAs by the incumbent national government provides an exogenous source of variation in grants that we exploit...

This paper analyzes the dynamic incentives for technology adoption under a transferable permits system, which allows for strategic trading on the permit market. Initially, firms can invest both in low-emitting production technologies and trade permits. In the model, technology adoption and...

We evaluate the effectiveness of a partial credit guarantee program implemented in a large Italian region using unique microdata from a broad set of firms. Our results show that the policy was effective to the extent that it resulted in an improved financial condition for the beneficiary firms....

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