This paper investigates the critical role of culture for economic recovery after natural disasters. Using Hurricane Katrina as our laboratory, we find a significant adverse treatment effect for plant-level productivity. However, local religious adherence and larger shares of ancestors with...

This paper shows that local banking market conditions affect mortality rates in the United States. Exploiting the staggered relaxation of branching restrictions in the 1990s across states, we find that banking deregulation decreases local mortality rates. This effect is driven by a decrease in...

We study the effect of the attitudes of a CEO's ancestors on firm performance. To do so, we collect detailed information on emigrants from Italian municipalities during the Age of Mass Migration (1892-1924) from Ellis Island ships lists and use emigration experience as a proxy for ancestors'...

This paper investigates the critical role of religion in the economic recovery after high-impact natural disasters. Exploiting the 2005 hurricane season in the southeast United States, we document that establishments in counties with higher religious adherence rates saw a significantly stronger...

Does increasing common ownership influence firms' automation strategies? We develop and empirically test a theory indicating that institutional investors' common ownership drives firms that employ workers in the same local labor markets to boost automation-related innovation. First, we present a...

This paper investigates behavior in the Traveler's Dilemma game and isolates deviations from textbook predictions caused by differences in welfare perceptions and strategic miscalculations. It presents the results of an experimental analysis based on a 2x2 design where the own and the other...

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is increasingly a core component of corporate strategy in the global economy. In recent years its importance has become even greater, primarily because of the financial scandals, investors’ losses, and reputational damage to listed companies. While...

We evaluate the impact of fair trade (FT) affiliation on child schooling within a sample of Chilean honey producers with a retrospective panel data approach. From a theoretical point of view we argue that FT should have a positive effect on child schooling since it generates a short run pure...

The nexus between social leisure and life satisfaction is riddled with endogeneity problems. In investigating the causal relationship going from the first to the second variable we start from considering that retirement is an event after which the time investable in (the outside job) relational...

Empirical analyses on the determinants of life satisfaction often include the impact of the number of children variable among controls without fully discriminating between its two (socio-relational and pecuniary) components. In our empirical analysis on the German Socioeconomic Panel we show...