"Spence meets Holmstrom: Luck and repetition in signalling" Abstract This paper studies repeated costly signalling when luck matters for the outcome. Benefit is obtained from the belief of the market, not directly from the effort or the signal. Nonstationary environments are allowed.In the unique equilibrium in which effort is linear in type, the more the…

"Online booking and information: competition and welfare consequences of review aggregators" Abstract Online review aggregators (e.g., Yelp or ClubKviar) provide detailed information about experience goods, such as restaurants and hotels. This study fosters our understanding of how such aggregators modify competition, profits and welfare. Using a spokes model ofhorizontal competition, I show that review aggregators enhance total welfare mainly by making valuable information…

"House Price Expectations" (Note: the seminar is on Thursday) Abstract Utilizing new survey data collected between 2009 and 2014, this paper analyzes American home owners' subjective expectations on future values of their own house. We explore the relationship between house price expectations, local economic conditions, and households' individual characteristics. We examine the heterogeneity in expectations based…

"The Effects of Merit-Based Financial Aid on Drinking in College" (Note: the seminar is on Thursday)

"Harsh or Humane? Prison Detention Conditions and Recidivism"   ABSTRACT We use quasi-random variation in the fraction of time served in the Italian"open-cell prison'' of Bollate to estimate the effect of rehabilitation efforts on recidivism. We deal with the endogeneity of rehabilitation assignments by focusing on those sources of variability in the length of exposure…

"Simultaneous Search in the Labor and Marriage Markets with Endogenous Schooling Decisions" (Note: the seminar is on Thursday) Abstract Labor market decisions are not taken in isolation when individuals areengaged in stable relationships. There now exist a number of estimatedmodels of household search able to address and estimate the impact of thesedecision processes. However, in these…

"Analytics of Ambiguity Aversion" (Note: the seminar is on Wednesday)

“From Family Culture to Welfare State Design”

"Identifying Sorting in Practice" Abstract We propose a novel methodology to detect assortative matching in the labor market using information on workers' mobility, firms' profits, and wages. We estimate the strength of sorting from a ranking of firms alone, built from firm-level profits. We identify the strength of sorting from the fraction of the variance in firm types explained…

"Trust and Cheating in Sri Lanka: The Role of Experimentally-Induced Emotions about Tsunami"

"Should Different People have Different Governments?"

"Education Policies and Migration across European Countries"

"The Effect of Immigration and Immigration Policies on the Underground Economy?"

"Social Interactions in Job Satisfaction"

“Norms, competition and visibility in contemporary science: the legacy of Robert K Merton” (Note: the seminar is on Friday) Abstract Can Robert K. Merton’s seminal work in the sociology of science still offer useful insights to understand key features, trends and challenges of science in contemporary societies? This paper focuses on two main topics. It addresses…

"A Test for Instrument Validity" Abstract This paper develops a specification test for instrument validity in the heterogeneous treatment effect model with a binary treatment and a discrete instrument. The strongest testable implication for instrument validity is given by the condition for non-negativity of point- identifiable complier’s outcome densities. Our specification test infers this testable…

"Dynamic Contracting with Limited Commitment and the Ratchet Effect"

"Inconspicuous conspicuous consumption” (Note: the seminar is on Friday)