The financial crisis highlighted the importance of systemic risks and of policies that can be employed to prevent and mitigate them. Several recent initiatives aim at establishing institutional frameworks for macro-prudential policy. As this process advances further, substantial uncertainties...

The ECB’s price stability mandate has been defined by the Treaty. But the Treaty has not spelled out what price stability precisely means. To make the mandate operational, the Governing Council has provided a quantitative definition in 1998 and a clarification in 2003. The landscape has...

The growth in labor market participation among women with young children has raised concerns about the potential negative impact of the mother's absence from home on child outcomes. Recent data show that mother's time spent with children has declined in the last decade, while the indicators of...

This paper investigates the effects of public childcare availability in Italy on mothers' working status and children's scholastic achievements. We use a newly available dataset containing individual standardized test scores of pupils attending second grade of primary school in 2008-09 in...

The Abecedarian Approach is a suite of teaching and learning strategies that were developed for the Abecedarian Studies (the Abecedarian Project, CARE, and IHDP), three longitudinal investigations to test the power of high quality early childhood services to improve the later academic...

There is growing state and national attention on addressing the achievement gap and increasing reading proficiency by 3rd grade. As state governments continue to face challenging fiscal conditions, there is a need to identify strategies that will lead to improved school readiness for at-risk...

(None)

We develop a matching model on the marriage market, where individuals have preferences over the smoking status of potential mates, and over their socioeconomic quality. Spousal smoking is bad for non-smokers, but it is neutral for smokers, while individuals always prefer high socioeconomic...

Parental beliefs, recognised by child psychologists as a causal influence on early development, are incorporated into a two-period model of human capital accumulation. In the first period parents transfer their beliefs, distinct from genes, to their child by signalling their "belief in a just...