Business activity and consumption activities are recognised as impacting, often negatively, on the environment. The challenge of ‘satisfying the needs of the present generation without compromising the chance for future generations to satisfy theirs’ requires, however, contributions by all...

We carry out a randomized experiment involving undergraduate students enrolled at an Italian University attending an introductory economics class to evaluate the impact on achievement of examination frequency and interim feedback provision. Students in the treated group were allowed to undertake...

The paper analyses the effect of fixed-term contracts on the probability of finding a permanent job in the Italian labour market. I estimate a continuous proportional hazard model with nonparametric smoothing splines for time varying continuous covariates. It will be shown that such a method...

This paper analyses theoretically favouritism in recruitment decisions. We study the investments in connections by applicants for jobs which pay a wage rent and the behaviour of public or private managers intending to favour the recruitment of connected agents in place of more competent...

Product quality is often unobservable ex-ante and consumers rely on experts’ judgments, sometimes coming under the form of ratings or awards. Do awards affect consumers’ choices or they are conferred to the most popular products? To disentangle this issue, we use data of the most important...

We analyze to what extent physical attractiveness is related to lifetime economic outcomes through the marriage market, investigating whether individual height and weight affect the probability of marrying with a “high quality partner”, measuring quality with the partner’s educational...

The aim of the paper is to investigate the impact of financial structure on firms’ probability of bankruptcy in Western Europe convergence regions. The empirical evidence shows that the financial structure is a key factor explaining firms’ bankruptcy, but while the debt, the cash flow and...

Procrastination produces harmful effects for human capital investments and studying activities. Using data from a large sample of Italian undergraduates, we measure procrastination with the actual behaviour of students, considering the delay in finalizing their university enrolment procedure. We...

In a simple theoretical model we show that impatience affects academic performance through two different channels: impatient students spend less effort in studying activities and set less ambitious objectives in terms of grades at exams. As a consequence, the relationship between impatience and...

We analyze how overconfidence is affected by superstitious beliefs and emotions induced by positive and negative stimuli in a field experiment involving about 700 Italian students who were randomly assigned to numbered seats in their written examination sessions. According to widespread...