In recent years many countries of the European Union (EU) have implemented comprehensive smoking bans to reduce exposure to tobacco smoke in public places and all indoor workplaces. Despite the intense public debate, research on the impact of smoking regulation on health, particularly within the...

This paper investigates the causal effect of a switch from fixed wages to collective performance-related pay on firm productivity, exploiting an exogenous variation in the institutional environment regulating collective bargaining. We find that the introduction of collective performance related...

This paper studies the impact on the length of school-to-work transition of a reform that extended from two to three years the short vocational track in Italy in the early 2000s. In the empirical analysis we use the Two Way Fixed Effect methodology to estimate the impact of the reform,...

In this paper we study the effect of different degrees of employment protection on absenteeism, paying attention to differences between workers moving from protected jobs to insecure jobs, on the one hand, and workers moving from insecure to secure jobs, on the other hand. Using a large...

This paper examines the effect of a high school student's relative position in the class achievement distribution on school violence. We identify this effect by exploiting idiosyncratic differences in the distribution of earlier academic achievement across classes. Such differences generate...

The aim of this paper is to study whether and how teaching style (i.e., traditional vs active mode) affects academic performance of young individuals in tertiary education. We focus on entrepreneurship education as an ideal subject for experimenting alternative teaching methods. 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...

We investigate the causal impact of retirement on healthcare utilization using SHARE data for 10 European countries. We show that the number of doctor's visits and the probability of visiting a doctor more than four times a year (our measures of healthcare utilization) increase after retirement....

This paper investigates the links between family values, social needs and individual preferences for welfare using data from the 2005 French “Generation and Gender Survey” (GGS). We analyse individual preferences, for financial assistance and the provision of care services, with respect to...

We analyze students' cheating behavior during a national evaluation test. We model the mechanisms that trigger cheating interactions between students and show that, when monitoring is not sufficiently accurate, a social multiplier may magnify the effects on students' achievements. We exploit a...