We examine the gender legacy of past institutions by comparing Italian municipalities located in a narrow band across the borders between the former Papal States on the one hand, and the former Grand Duchy of Tuscany and the Duchy of Modena on the other. Our results show that a century after the...

While there is a vast literature considering the labour market effects of immigration, less has been done to investigate how immigration affects the educational choices of young natives. Using Italian provincial data and an instrumental variables strategy, we show that the recent increase in the...

The paper studies, in a repeated interaction setting, how the presence of cooperative agents in a heterogeneous community organized in groups affects efficiency and group stability. The paper expands on existing literature by assuming that each type can profitably mimic other types. It is shown...

We suggest a methodology for identifying the implications of alternative cultural and social norms embodied by religious denomination on labour market outcomes, by estimating the differential impact of Protestantism versus Catholicism on the propensity to be an entrepreneur, on the basis of the...

We use a natural experiment to show that the presence of an external examiner in standardized school tests reduces the proportion of correct answers in monitored classes by 5.5 to 8.5% - depending on the grade and the test - with respect to classes in schools with no external monitor. We find...

We estimate the causal effects of regular and occasional grandchild care on the depression of grandmothers and grandfathers, using data from the Survey on Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe and an instrumental variables strategy which exploits the variation in the timing of interviews...

We estimate the effect of the high school curriculum (or track) on the returns to college using data from the Italian PLUS (Participation Labour and Unemployment Survey) survey. We find that college graduates with vocational high school are less likely to be employed than graduates with academic...

We provide a large scale within-country analysis of the effect of language future time reference (FTR) on the choice of being an entrepreneur using individual-level data from Switzerland, a country characterized by a unique long-standing multilingualism and a large share of immigrant population....

Secondary schools in the developed world differ in the degree of differentiation and in the first age of selection of pupils into different tracks. In this paper, we account for the heterogeneity of tracking time with a simple stochastic model which conjugates the returns from specialization...