We report that on any given day the number of inmates released from incarceration significantly affects the number of offenses committed this day, and we name this as first-day recidivism. Our estimates of this novel approach to study early recidivism are robust to a variety of alternative model...

We study a recent recruitment drive for public sector positions in Mexico. Different salaries were announced randomly across recruitment sites, and job offers were subsequently randomized. Screening relied on exams designed to measure applicants' intellectual ability, personality, and...

I exploit a unique historical event to explore the causal relationship between individual wealth and posterior political power. Shortly after the founding of Buenos Aires, plots of land in the outskirts of the city were randomly assigned to all heads of household that participated in the...

We exploit a series of natural experiments that use real crime data to investigate the effect of a violation of expectancies on violent crime. We study two types of violation of expectancies that generate the emotions of frustration and euphoria. Our empirical designs exploit differential...