Evaluation of corrupt activities is incrementally based on administration of questionnaires to firms in business, and generally involves a large number of items. Data collected by questionnaires of this type can be analyzed by Latent Class (LC) models in order to classify firms into homogeneous...

The debate over the economic effects of military spending continues to develop, with no consensus, but a deepening understanding of the issues and limitations of previous work. A recent survey has suggested that the inclusion of post Cold War data has tended to make finding a negative effect...

A decade ago, the political party of the Italian center-right voted a law restricting immigration. It emphasized severity in granting permits to stay and limited illegal immigration. However, the law became effective in early 2005, when the Italian parliament approved the decree for its...

This paper examines the causal effects of smoking behavior on body weight in Italy. In 2005, the Italian government introduced a smoking ban in all indoor public places. We use a regression discontinuity design, which exploits this exogenous variation across cohorts to achieve identification in...

This paper evaluates the effects of cash transfer (CT) programmes introduced during the 1990s and 2000s on food security in a sample of sub-Saharan African countries. We apply the synthetic control method to compare changes in the post-intervention food insecurity trajectories of economies...

In this paper, we re-examine the magnitude of the impact of government spending on private consumption by a new Keynesian approach, focusing on the role of military spending. For this reason, we separate civilian and military spending in the U.S. economy and analyse their respective effects. Our...

We consider estimation of the causal effect of a sequential binary treatment (typically corresponding to a policy or a subsidy in the economic context) on a final outcome, when the treatment assignment at a given occasion depends on the sequence of previous assignments as well as on time-varying...

Objectives We investigate about the differences in birthweight between firstand second-borns, evaluating the impact of changes in pregnancy (e.g., gestational age), demographic (e.g., age), and social (e.g., education level, marital status) maternal characteristics. Data and Methods All analyses...

In this paper, we use US data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to examine unintended side-effects related to smoking bans, and cigarette prices, and taxes on health behaviors. Our findings show that smoking bans not only had positive direct effects on smoking but also induced...

We propose a causal analysis of the mother’s educational level on the health status of the newborn, in terms of gestational weeks and weight. The analysis is based on a finite mixture structural equation model, the parameters of which have a causal interpretation. The model is applied to a...