Applying a differences-in-differences strategy, I study the decentralization of university admission as a natural experiment. Is the centralized or decentralized procedure better suited to match prospective students to universities? The analysis uses administrative data on all students within...

This paper evaluates the effects of a major Swedish school choice reform. The reform in 1992 increased school choice and competition among public schools as well as through a large-scale introduction of private schools. We estimate the effects of school choice and competition, using precise...

The tourism in Portugal has been an important contribution to the economic development of the country, namely in zones where is difficult to implement others activities, specifically the manufacturing. The objective of this work is to analyze, for the period 2002-2011, with spatial econometric...

American governors acquire enhanced regulatory and decision-making powers for economic development, the prevalence of statewide business scorecards and other factors are prompting voters to make these politicians and their agents responsible for the financial well-being of their states....

This study examines the role of downside higher order co-moments in asset pricing models when stock returns are not normal. We test the effect of higher order downside co-moments using a data set of daily returns of Société des Bourses Françaises 250 Index stocks during the period 1987-2009....

This study extends the herding measures proposed by Warmers (1999), Lakonishok, Shleifer and Vishny (1992) and Borensztein and Gaston (2003) for stocks overbought and oversold by institutional investors as well as the information content related to institutional herding proposed by Nofsinger and...

We look at business survey data on Italian internationalized firms’ characteristics and performances since the outbreak of the 2008 crisis until 2012. Among Italian firms with 20 employees or more, an increasing share (from 7.1 to 13.2% between 2006 and 2011) owns a foreign productive unit....

To explore the effects of daylights saving time (DST) transition on cognitive performance and risk-taking behaviour immediately before and one week after the shift to DST, this study examines two Australian populations living in similar geographic surroundings who experience either no DST...

This paper estimates the effect of contactless payment on the spending ratio in terms of transactions for different transaction types at the point-of-sale. The specifc devices that are investigated are debit and credit cards, to which the feature is embedded. Data is drawn from a national...

We consider the problem of estimating IBNR (Incurred But Not Reported) loss reserves in non-life insurance. The literature proposes a wide variety of methods to estimate IBNR reserves, mostly based on the chain-ladder approach (Mack, 1993). In this paper we focus on two methods, in which...