This paper estimates the causal effect of the prospect of legal status on the employment outcomes of undocumented immigrants. Our identification strategy exploits a natural experiment provided by the 2002 amnesty program in Italy that introduced an exogenous discontinuity in eligibility based on...

Despite the enduring appeal of fair trade activism, little evidence exists on its effectiveness in improving producer welfare. This paper provides evidence on the direct effects of a fair trade premium on its target beneficiaries, using the case of the Penny-Per-Pound, a program that increased...

Dramatic events can evoke feelings of compassion, fear, or threat, and can affect public opinion regarding controversial issues. Such an event was the drowning of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi, a Syrian boy whose body washed up on a Turkish shore, and was photographed, producing an iconic image that was...

The Public Employment Agency (PEA) helps unemployed to find work and mediates PEA-registered job vacancies to job seekers via vacancy referrals. Using the spatial and temporal variation resulting from the regional roll-out of the Hartz 3 reform we are able to show that Hartz 3, which changed...

Mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium is the cornerstone of our understanding of strategic situations that require decision makers to be unpredictable. Using data from nearly half a million serves over 3000 tennis matches, and data on player rankings from the ATP and WTA, we examine whether the...

Health care markets often lack a market force because the presence of health insurance undermines price signals. Patients have little incentive to shop for low-priced alternatives because they do not bear the full cost of their health care consumption. In turn, producers lack incentives to...

We use outages as natural experiments to study sovereign bond market functioning. When the euro area futures market goes down, trading activity on the cash market declines, liquidity evaporates, and transaction prices deviate from fundamental values. Tracing back this macro-level market...

Competitions often suffer from biased judgments by officials tied to their social identities. In international cricket, home nation umpires favoured home teams, but neutral umpires were introduced successfully to address this bias. However, the COVID-19 pandemic prompted the return of home...

Human-created works represent critical data inputs to artificial intelligence (AI). Strategic behaviour can play a major role for AI training datasets, be it in limiting access to existing works or in deciding which types of new works to create or whether to create new works at all. We examine...

This thesis consists of three independent essays, unified by the common theme of the distributional impacts of government.The first paper estimates the price elasticity of demand for pharmaceuticals amongst high-income older people in Australia. It exploits a natural experiment by which some...