The Syrian Civil War gave rise to the largest refugee flight reaching Europe since the Yugoslavian wars in the 1990s. The crisis evidenced the deficiencies of the European Union Asylum Policy, which struggled both to offer solutions to Syrian refugees and to efficiently allocate costs across...

International migration is maybe the single most effective way to alleviate poverty at a global level. When a given host country allows more immigrants in, this creates costs and benefits for that particular country as well as a positive externality for all those (individuals and governments)...

The current EU Asylum policy is widely seen as ineffective and unfair. We propose an EU-wide market for tradable quotas on both refugees and asylum-seekers coupled with a matching mechanism linking countries' and migrants' preferences. We show that the proposed system can go a long way towards...

In this paper we assess the effectiveness of a social public procurement policy in Switzerland that gives firms that train apprentices a preferential treatment. We estimate the effectiveness of this social procurement policy on a firm's training participation, training intensity, and training...

In 1997, Australia implemented a gun buyback program that reduced the stock of firearms by around one-fifth. Using differences across states in the number of firearms withdrawn, we test whether the reduction in firearms availability affected firearm homicide and suicide rates. We find that the...

We investigate the relationship between the time politicians stay in office and the functioning of public procurement. To this purpose, we collect a data set on the Italian municipal governments and all the procurement auctions they administered between 2000 and 2005. Identification is achieved...

In the 1980s, many U.S. cities initiated programs reserving a proportion of government contracts for minority-owned businesses. The staggered introduction of these set-aside programs is used to estimate their impacts on the self-employment and employment rates of African-American men. Black...

This paper assesses the effects of changes in scoring weights in auctions, using a unique sample of biddings of private Welfare-to-Work (WTW) organizations to reintegrate groups of unemployed and disabled workers. WTW-organizations did not only bid on prices, but also received points for three...

Public support of research typically relies on the notion that universities are engines of economic development, and that university research is a primary driver of high wage localized economic activity. Yet the evidence supporting that notion is based on aggregate descriptive data, rather than...

The possible negative consequences of Artificial Intelligence (AI) have given rise to calls for public policy to ensure that it is safe, and to prevent improper use and misuse. Human-centered AI (HCAI) draws on ethical principles and puts forth actionable guidelines in this regard. So far...