This paper presents a model in which homogeneous rational agents choose between two competing technologies. Agents observe a private signal and a sample of other agents’ previous choices. The signal has both an idiosyncratic and an aggregate component of uncertainty. I derive the optimal...

Are suicides rational? At least since the 70's economists have been trying to shed light on this question by studying whether suicide rates are related to contemporaneous economic conditions. This paper goes one step further: we test whether suicides are linked to forward-looking behavior. In...

We study the problem of efficient auction design in environments with interdependent values, under arbitrary common knowledge assumptions. We propose a simple mechanism and show that, under a rather mild condition, it "robustly" achieves efficiency. Our mechanism consists in a standard Vickrey...

We explore the causality relationship between litigation rates and the number of lawyers, drawing on an original panel dataset for the 169 Italian first instance courts of justice between 2000 and 2007. In this time bracket, both the number of lawyers and the civil litigation rate sharply...

This paper asks whether the availability of breastfeeding facilities at the workplace helps to reconcile breastfeeding and work commitments. Using data from the 2005 UK Infant Feeding Survey, we model the joint probability to return to work and breastfeeding and analyse its association with the...

This paper studies two frequently observed portfolio behaviors that are seemingly inconsistent with rational portfolio choice. The first is the tendency of workers and entrepreneurs to hold their company's stock. The second is the propensity of workers to limit their equity holdings through...

This paper investigates the effects of public childcare availability in Italy on mothers' working status and children's scholastic achievements. We use a newly available dataset containing individual standardized test scores of pupils attending second grade of primary school in 2008-09 in...

Previous researchers have modelled the decision to accept a donor organ for transplantation as a Markov decision problem, the solution to which is often a control-limit optimal policy: accept any organ whose match quality exceeds some health-dependent threshold; otherwise, wait for another. When...

I establish a necessary and sufficient condition for the securities' market to be dynamically-complete in a single-commodity, pure-exchange economy with many Lucas' trees whose dividends are geometric Brownian motions. Even though my analysis is based upon the representative-agent version of...

We propose a flexible stochastic framework for modeling the market share dynamics over time in a multiple markets setting, where firms interact within and between markets. Firms undergo stochastic idiosyncratic shocks, which contract their shares, and compete to consolidate their position by...