Studies in the social capital literature have documented two stylised facts: first, a decline in measures of social participation has occurred in many OECD countries. Second, and more recently, the success of social networking sites (SNSs) has resulted in a steep rise in online social...

It is widely accepted that investing in public infrastructure promotes economic development. However, there is little awareness of the prevalence of unfinished infrastructure projects and their consequences. In this paper, I study the effect of unfinished sewerage infrastructure on early-life...

Social capital is often represented by generalized trust - the degree to which one trusts "most (unknown) people". It is assumed to be enhanced by diverse group interactions. In the social capital literature, it is opposed by particularized trust, which represents our mutual confidence in...

In this paper, football data from the 2007/2008 to 2016/2017 seasons of the Italian Serie A were used to identify the effects of replacing a coach mid-season due to poor team performance. We used an instrumental variable approach to correlate coach turnover within a season with player...

We show that the contemporaneous and longer horizon impulse responses estimated using small-scale Proxy structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) can be severely biased in the presence of information insufficiency. Instead, we recommend the use of a Proxy Factor Augmented VAR (FAVAR) model that...

In recent years local projections have become a more and more popular methodology for the estimation of impulse responses. Besides being relatively easy to implement, the main strength of this approach relative to the traditional VAR one is that there is no need to impose any specific assumption...

I provide evidence of the severe social costs imposed by infrastructure projects that are being implemented (i.e., projects started but not yet completed) in the context of sewerage in Peru. Using a counterfactual implementation predicted from geography-based cost considerations as an...

An instrumental variables (IV) identification strategy that exploits statutory class size caps shows significant achievement gains in smaller classes in Italian primary schools. Gains from small classes are driven mainly by schools in Southern Italy, suggesting a substantial return to class size...

This article documents a strong connection between unemployment and mental disorders using data from the Spanish National Health Survey. We exploit the collapse of the construction sector to identify the causal effect of job loss. Our results suggest that an increase of the unemployment rate by...

This paper aims at improving the application of the learning curve, a popular tool used for forecasting future costs of renewable technologies in integrated assessment models (IAMs). First, we formally discuss under what assumptions the traditional (OLS) estimates of the learning curve can...