"How Do Elected and Appointed Policymakers Act When in Office?Citizens, Candidates, and Leaders"

"When Warm Glow Burns: Motivational (mis)allocation in the non-profit sector"

"Equilibrium price of immediacy and infrequent trade" abstract The paper studies the equilibrium value of bid-ask spreads and time-to-trade in a continuous-time, intermediated financial market. The endogenous spreads are the price at which brokers are willing to offer immediacy. In case intermediaries pay trading costs, it includes them too. We determine equilibrium trading policies, returns…

"On the Identification of Production Functions: HowHeterogeneous is Productivity?" (Note: the seminar is on Thursday) abstract The estimation of production functions suffers from an unresolved identification problem caused by flexible inputs, such as intermediate inputs. We develop an identification strategy for production functions based on a transformation of the firm’s short-run first order condition that solves…

"Crime is Terribly Revealing: An Evaluation of Predictive Policing" abstract An increasing number of police departments around the world are trying to use predictive policing as a way to improve clearance rates at times of shrinking budgets. The police department of Milan has been working on a software that predicts future crime since 2008. This…

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"On the Historical and Geographic Origins of the Sicilian Mafia" Abstract     This research attempts to explain the large differences in the early diffusion of the mafia across different areas of Sicily. We advance the hypothesis that, after the demise of Sicilian feudalism, the lack of publicly provided property-right protection from widespread banditry favored the development…

"Informational Herding in the Provision of Public Goods"

"Do Performance Targets A ffect Financial Support to Schools? Evidence from Discontinuities in Test Scores"

"Bilateral Trust and the Ownership Structure of Foreign Direct Investments: Evidence from European Firm Level Data" abstract It is often argued that the foreign direct investments (FDIs) have positive effects on host countries. In particular, multinationals tend to have some competitive advantage based on superior technology or other firm-specic knowledge and, therefore, inward FDIs are…

"For a Fistful of Euros. Tales of Ordinary unemployment" abstract In most developed countries the insurance against involuntary unemployment is a pivotal policy in the support of workers. In Italy, it has just a marginal role; furthermore, it is currently questioned for the very low coverage it grants to its target population. In this paper we…

"Income Growth and Institutional Quality: Evidence fromInternational Oil Price Shocks"

"Youngsters' Reaction to Emancipation Incentives"by Ainhoa Aparicio and Veruska Opedisano Abstract We study the income and substitution effects of a rental subsidy together with its effectiveness in promoting youngsters' independence. We exploit the introduction of a sizeable monthly subsidy in Spain in 2008, granted to all youngsters in the 22-29 age brackets who earn a…

"On the construction of stationary process and their applications" abstract I will review a simple idea to construct strictly stationary Markov processes with given marginal distributions. The proposed methodology is appealing in that it keeps track ofthe underlying transition probabilities, hence being of interest in estimation, simulation and applied problems. Various classes of time series…

"Instability of Informed Coordination" (Note: the seminar is on Tuesday) Abstract When agents use observational learning to learn about the fundamentals of a coordination game, there are multiple equilibria. In some equilibria information is efficiently transmitted through observational learning, while in others private information is disregarded entirely. Investigating the stability of these equilibria in a stochastic…