Over the period 1995–1998 Italy experienced an expansion of its higher education supply with the aim of reducing regional differences in educational attainment. This paper evaluates the effects of this policy by combining differences across provinces in the number of campuses constructed with...

Recent research on the economics of human development deepens understanding of the origins of inequality and excellence. It draws on and contributes to personality psychology and the psychology of human development. Inequalities in family environments and investments in children are substantial....

Differences in answers in Internet and traditional surveys can be due to selection, mode, or context effects. We exploit unique experimental data to analyze mode and context effects controlling for arbitrary selection. The Health and Retirement Study (HRS) surveys a random sample of the US 50+...

There has recently been considerable interest in the potential adverse effects associated with excessive uncertainty in energy futures markets. Theoretical models of investment under uncertainty predict that increased uncertainty will tend to induce firms to delay investment. These models are...

This paper examines the volatility and covariance dynamics of cash and futures contracts that underlie the Optimal Hedge Ratio (OHR) across different hedging time horizons. We examine whether hedge ratios calculated over a short term hedging horizon can be scaled and successfully applied to...

We present a novel procedure for scaling relatively high frequency tail probability and quantile estimates for the conditional distribution of returns.

Do students benefit from compulsory schooling? In an important article, Oreopoulos (2006) studied the 1947 British compulsory schooling law change and found large returns to schooling of about 15% using the General Household Survey (GHS). Reanalysing this dataset, we find much smaller returns of...

The international financial crisis manifests itself in Ireland not only as a crisis of the banking system, but also as a major fiscal crisis, aggravated by years of soft revenue policy and a housing bubble that has burst spectacularly. The severe drop in economic output results in a crisis of...