We estimate the private (individual) and social return to schooling in Italy and four macro-regions. Our estimates take into account the effects of schooling on employment and wages as well as the key features of the Italian tax and social insurance system. We find that the individual return to...

We study how restrictions on firm entry affect intersectoral factor reallocation when open economies experience global economic shocks. In our theoretical framework, countries trade freely in a range of differentiated sectors that are subject to country-specific and global shocks. Entry...

We examine the effect of oil price fluctuations on democratic institutions over the 1960-2007 period. We also exploit the very persistent response of income to oil price fluctuations to study the effect of persistent (oil price-driven) income shocks on democracy. Our results indicate that...

We propose estimating gender peer effects in school by exploiting within-school variation in gender composition across birth cohorts. Our approach differs from the existing literature, which exploits variation in gender composition at a given grade level in different years. We argue that the...

International industry data permits testing whether the industry-specific impact of cross-country differences in institutions or policies is consistent with economic theory. Empirical implementation requires specifying the industry characteristics that determine impact strength. Most of the...

How much would output increase if underdeveloped economies were to increase their levels of schooling? We contribute to the development ac- counting literature by describing a non-parametric upper bound on the increase in output that can be generated by more schooling. The advantage of our...

We examine the effect of oil price fluctuations on democratic institutions over the 1960–2007 period. We also exploit the very persistent response of income to oil price fluctuations to study the effect of persistent (oil-price-driven) income shocks on democracy. Our results indicate that...

Building on the idea that members of religious communities insure each other against some idiosyncratic risks, we argue that religious communities should be more widespread where populations face greater common risk. Our empirical analysis exploits rainfall risk as a source of common...

Identification of the strength of human capital externalities at the aggregate level is still not fully understood. The existing method may yield positive or negative externalities even if wages reflect marginal social products. We propose an approach that yields positive average human capital...

The identification of aggregate human-capital externalities is still not fully understood. The existing ("Mincerian") approach confounds positive externalities with wage changes due to a downward sloping demand curve for human capital. As a result, the Mincerian approach yields positive...