Decentralization can lead to "good" or "bad" outcomes depending on the socio-cultural norms of the targeted communities. We investigate this issue by looking at the evolution of familism and nepotism in the Italian academia before and after the 1998 reform, which decentralized the recruitment of...

In this paper, another aspect of optimizing behavior is considered. Specifically, it asks whether variations in levels of attained schooling across groups can be explained by a model that assumes that capital markets are perfect and that individuals maximize wealth. The logic of the analysis...

The educational attainment of siblings is highly correlated. We test for a specific type of peer effect between siblings in educational attainment: genetic nurture. Specifically, we test whether a person's educational attainment is correlated with their sibling's polygenic score (PGS) for...

Using birth certificates matched to schooling records for Florida children born 1992-2002, we assess whether family disadvantage disproportionately impedes the pre-market development of boys. We find that, relative to their sisters, boys born to disadvantaged families have higher rates of...

The share of children living in a two-parent family has declined sharply in the past 40 years, driven by a decline in marriage among parents without a four-year college degree. This paper presents a number of facts about these trends, drawing on US Census data, the Current Population Survey, the...

In this paper we investigate whether peers' behavior influences the choice of college major, thus contributing to the mismatch of skills in the labor market. Using a newly constructed dataset, we are able to identify the endogenous effect of peers on such decisions through a novel identification...

We estimate peer effects for fourth graders in six European countries. The identification relies on variation across classes within schools. We argue that classes within primary schools are formed roughly randomly with respect to family background. Similar to previous studies, we find sizeable...

Decisions to invest in human capital depend on people's time preferences. We show that differences in patience are closely related to substantial subnational differences in educational achievement, leading to new perspectives on longstanding within-country disparities. We use social-media data -...