In this paper we study how the Great Recession affected university students in terms of performance, with a special focus on the dropout probability. To do so, we use individual-level data on a representative sample of university students in Italy in 2007 and 2011. We measure the severity of the...

The role of friends in the US opioid epidemic is examined. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (Add Health), adults aged 25-34 and their high school best friends are focused on. An instrumental variable technique is employed to estimate peer effects in opioid...

This paper studies the impact of downward wage rigidity on wage and employment dynamics after the outbreak of major recessions in Spain. Downward wage rigidity stems from collective agreements, which set province-sector-skill specific minimum wage floors for all workers. By exploiting variation...

This study examines how early-life exposure to food scarcity influences individuals' long-term time preferences and savings behavior. To this end, we analyze hand-collected historical data on livestock availability during World War II at the provincial level, alongside detailed survey data on...

This paper studies the long-term consequences on firms and workers of the credit crunch triggered by the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. Relying on a unique matched bank-employer-employee administrative dataset, we construct a firm-specific credit supply shock and examine firms’ and...

This study explores the long-run effects of a temporary scarcity of a consumption good on preferences towards that good once the shock is over. Specifically, we focus on individuals who were children during World War II and assess the consequences of the temporary drop in meat availability they...

Dynamic interactions among stock return, Research and Development (R&D) expenses, patent applications based on R&D investment, and the propensity to patent are studied in this work for a panel of firms from the United States. The panel includes technologically similar firms, neck-to-neck, mostly...

A critique that has been directed towards the log-GARCH model is that its logvolatility specification does not exist in the presence of zero returns. A common "remedy" is to replace the zeros with a small (in the absolute sense) non-zero value. However, this renders Quasi Maximum Likelihood...