This paper estimates the effect of employment protection legislation (EPL) on workers' individual wages in a quasi-experimental setting, exploiting a reform that introduced unjust-dismissal costs in Italy for firms below 15 employees and left firing costs unchanged for bigger firms. Accounting...

We exploit a change in compulsory schooling laws in Turkey to estimate the causal effects of education on religiosity and women's socio-economic status. A new law, implemented in 1998 bound individuals born after a specific date to 8 years of schooling while those born earlier could drop out...

An extensive literature has studied lobbying by special interest groups. We analyze a novel lobbying channel: lobbying businessmen-politicians through business proxies. When a politician controls a business, firms attempting to curry favors shift their spending towards the politician’s...

We provide experimental evidence that subjects blame others based on events they are not responsible for. In our experiment an agent chooses between a lottery and a safe asset; payment from the chosen option goes to a principal who then decides how much to allocate between the agent and a third...

This paper employs a recent statistical algorithm (CRAGGING) in order to build an early warning model for banking crises in emerging markets. We perturb our data set many times and create “artificial” samples from which we estimated our model, so that, by construction, it is flexible enough...

Gneezy (2005) reports evidence indicating that in some settings people do not like to lie. In many other situations people do not suffer when they lie. We argue that the theory of simple guilt can accommodate these observations.

We analyze the value of information in the market for corporate control. The raider and the shareholders are privately and imperfectly informed about the post-takeover value of the firm. We show that public information provision reduces the dispersion of the shareholders’ beliefs resulting in...

We establish an Ergodic Theorem for lower probabilities, a generalization of standard probabilities widely used in applications. As an application, we provide a version for lower probabilities of the Strong Law of Large Numbers.

We study a Mean-Risk model derived from a behavioral theory of Disappointment with multiple reference points. One distinguishing feature of the risk measure is that it is based on mutual deviations of outcomes, not deviations from a specific target. We prove necessary and sufficient conditions...