We compute new measures of religious diversity and intolerance and study their effects on civil conflict. Using a religion tree that describes the relationship between different religions, we compute measures of religious diversity at three different levels of aggregation. We find that religious...

Using the daily trade of futures from the prediction markets site Intrade, we pin down the effect of printed newspapers endorsements (announcement of an explicit support for a political candidate) on the candidates' likelihood of winning. It is established that unexpected endorsements have a...

This paper focuses on young adults living with their parents in the U.S. and studies the role of peers. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health)we analize the influence of high school friends on the coresidence of young adults with their parents. We...

This paper investigates the role of energy on U.S. agricultural productivity using panel data at the state level for the period 1960-2004. We first provide a historical account of energy use in U.S. agriculture. To do this we rely on the Bennet cost indicator to study how the price and volume...

We study the optimal provision of unemployment insurance (UI) in a framework that distinguishes between consumption and expenditure. We derive a "sufficient statistics" formula for optimal UI that is expressed terms of observable variables and can therefore be used in applied work. Recent...

This paper studies risk selection between public and private health insurance when some individuals can purchase private insurance by opting out of otherwise mandatory public insurance. Using a theoretical model, I show that public insurance is adversely selected when insurers and insureds are...

This paper presents and evaluates estimation methods for dynamic nonlinear correlated random effects (CRE) models with unbalanced panels. Accounting for the unbalancedness is crucial in dynamic non-linear models and it cannot be ignored even if the process that produces it is completely at...

In this paper we investigate the characteristics of the citation distributions of the 500 universities inthe 2013 edition of the CWTS Leiden Ranking. We use a WoS dataset consisting of 3.6 million articles published in 2003-2008 with a five-year citation window, and classified into 5,119...

The usual solution to the aggregation problem of heterogeneous fields in the all-sciences case relies onthe prior normalization of the raw citations received by any publication. In this paper, we propose analternative solution that does not require any prior field-normalization. The citation...

Developing countries are increasingly concerned about improving country competitiveness and productivity, as they face the increasing pressures of globalization and attempt to improve economic growth and reduce poverty. Among such countries, Investment Climate surveys (ICs) at the firm level,...