Migration may cause not only a brain drain but also a civicness drain, leading to an uncivicness trap. We study this possibility using college choices of southern-Italian students classified as Civic if not cheating in a die-roll experiment. Local civicness is the fraction of Civic in their...

The possible non linearity of the income elasticity of child labour has been at the centre of the debate regarding both its causes and the policy instruments to address it. We contribute to this debate providing theoretical and empirical novel results. From a theoretical point of view, for any...

Modern economies deprive workers of natural democratic rights and any share of the surplus they produce, with most of the benefits of growth appropriated by capital owners. Worker wellbeing and job satisfaction are ignored unless they contribute directly to profitability, while precarious...

The unprecedented consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic have raised concerns about intensified social unrest, but evidence for such a link and the underlying channels is still lacking. We use a unique combination of nationally representative survey data, event data on social unrest, and data on...

We use plausibly exogenous variation in the redistribution of natural resource tax revenues in Peru to study whether transfers to local governments can stimulate economic activity in low-income areas. We show that resource windfalls to non-extractive municipalities between 2006 and 2018 changed...

This paper uses as source material twenty-three autobiographical essays by Nobel economists presented since 1984 at Trinity University (San Antonio, Texas) and published in Lives of the Laureates (MIT Press). A goal of the lecture series is to enhance understanding of the link between biography...

We present a framework that incorporates both moral motivations and fairness considerations into utility. The main idea is that individuals face a preference trade-off between their material individual interest and their desire to follow moral norms. In our model, we assume that moral motivation...

This paper uses as source material twenty-three autobiographical essays by Nobel economists presented since 1984 at Trinity University (San Antonio, Texas) and published in Lives of the Laureates (MIT Press). A goal of the lecture series is to enhance understanding of the link between biography...

Although formal education is often considered an indicator of political leaders' quality, the evidence on the effectiveness of educated leaders is mixed. Besides, minimum education qualifications are increasingly being used as requirements for contesting elections, making it critical to...

We examine the role of cooperative preferences, beliefs, and punishments to uncover potential cross-societal differences in voluntary cooperation. Using one-shot public goods experiments in four comparable subject pools from the US and the UK (two similar Western societies) and Morocco and...