A single worker allocates her time among different projects which are progressively assigned. When the worker works on too many projects at the same time, the output rate decreases and completion time increases according to a law which we derive. We call this phenomenon "task juggling" and argue...

We show that task juggling, i.e., the spreading of effort across too many active projects, decreases the performance of workers, raising the chances of low throughput, long duration of projects and exploding backlogs. Individual speed of job completion cannot be explained only in terms of...

We show that task juggling, i.e., the spreading of effort across too many active projects, decreases the performance of workers, raising the chances of low throughput, long duration of projects and exploding backlogs. Individual speed of job completion cannot be explained only in terms of...

We analyze data on NYPD's "stop and frisk program" in an effort to identify racial bias on the part of the police officers making the stops. We find that the officers are not biased against African Americans relative to whites, because the latter are being stopped despite being a "less...

The productive and allocative theories predict that education has positive impact on health: the more educated adopt healthier life styles and use more efficiently health inputs and this explains why they live longer. We find partial support for these theories with an econometric analysis on a...

Warnings commonly formulated about the use of the "weighted average cost of capital" (WACC) are at all inapplicable when dealing with a new project. In this case, namely, the WACC must be calculated with respect to properly defined book values, not to yet non-existing market ones; nor can a...

We examine by means of an artefactual field experiment on a representative sample of Italian adults, the impact of information and belief elicitation on charitable-giving when donors know (or express their beliefs on) what the organizations received in terms of aggregate donations in the past....

We address the problem of selecting the common factors that are relevant for forecasting macroeconomic variables. In economic forecasting using diffusion indexes the factors are ordered, according to their importance, in terms of relative variability, and are the same for each variable to...

This paper analyzes the causes and consequences of the enforcement actions (sanctions) imposed by supervisory authorities for banks. Focusing on a sample of Italian banks between 2005 and 2012, we found 302 sanctions regarding 3,588 persons (i.e. Board of directors, Top Managers, and Chief...