We interview both parents and their children enrolled in six primary schools in the district of Treviso (Italy). We study the structural differences between the children network of friends reported by children and the one elicited asking their parents. We find that the parents' network has a...

We evaluate a natural experiment at a Swedish university, in which students were randomized to either taking all their courses online, or to have some courses online and some on campus (blended learning). Our setting creates two groups for the online courses: One group with no access to campus...

We highlight that convergence in repeated averaging models commonly used to study cultural traits or opinion dynamics is not equivalent to convergence in Markov chain settings if transition matrices are time-varying. We then establish a new proof for the convergence of cultural traits in the...

Inaccurate beliefs about social norms can reduce useful social interactions and adversely affect an individual's ability to deal with negative shocks. We implement a randomized controlled trial with low-income workers in urban India who lack access to formal financial and healthcare support. We...

The main objective of this paper is to analyse some aspects of Japanese policy in the post World War-II period and understand how the various informal institutions (shared mental models) have influenced key dimensions of technology strategy with regard to the nature and trajectory of activities...

This paper examines Total Factor Productivity (TFP) and knowledge flows, using international patent data. The result is a measure of technology that isolates sources of innovation and their contributions to domestic TFP. Within-industry innovation enhances domestic productivity, and domestic...

The Recruitment grant was a student aid policy that replaced the loans in the student aid system with grants for unemployed adults with low education. In this paper, I estimate the causal effects of repealing this policy on the educational attainment and subsequent labor market outcomes for the...

We describe a rational expectations model in which speculative bubbles in house prices can emerge. Within this model both speculators and their lenders use interest-only mortgages (IOs) rather than traditional mortgages when there is a bubble. Absent a bubble, there is no tendency for IOs to be...

The authors construct a dynamic general equilibrium model of cities and use it to estimate the effect of local agglomeration on per capita consumption growth. Agglomeration affects growth through the density of economic activity: higher production per unit of land raises local productivity....

Cities experience significant, near random walk productivity shocks, yet population is slow to adjust. In practise local population changes are dominated by variation in net migration, and we argue that understanding gross migration is essential to quantify how net migration may slow population...