Urban areas tend to have much more productive labor and higher salaries than rural areas, and there are vast differences across urban areas. Areas with high salaries and high productivity tend to have employers that invest in much more research and development than areas with low salaries and...

Real estate agents typically charge a 6 percent commission, regardless of the price of the house sold. As a consequence, the commission fee from selling a house will differ dramatically across cities depending on the average price of housing, although the effort necessary to match buyers and...

Innovative glazing systems with silica aerogel in interspace were investigated for energy saving in buildings. Aerogel is a promising transparent insulating material, due to its low thermal conductivity (down to 0.010Wm−1K−1), high solar factor, high daylight transmittance and remarkable...

Energy savings for heating, air conditioning and illuminating plants could be improved by innovative Transparent Insulation Materials (TIMs), which aim to optimize two opposite requirements: transparency and thermal insulation. Aerogel is one of the most promising materials for use in highly...

The present work deals with the problem of monitoring and diagnosis, through non-intrusive methodologies, of stationary internal combustion engine, with particular attention to the cogenerative 1MW unit installed at the Engineering Faculty of the University of Perugia. Specifically, acoustic and...

We investigate the health consequences of changes in the supply of fast food using the exact geographical location of fast food restaurants. Specifically, we ask how the supply of fast food affects the obesity rates of 3 million school children and the weight gain of over 1 million pregnant...

Financial incentives from state governments are part of a growing trend of policies designed to spur innovation clusters in specific regions. Biotechnology industry clusters in particular have benefited from these subsidies, which have boosted the number of star biotech scientists in those...

Do shareholders of acquiring companies profit from acquisitions, or do acquiring CEOs overbidand destroy shareholder value? Answering this question is difficult since the hypotheticalcounterfactual is hard to determine. We exploit merger contests to address the identificationissue. In those...

Using data on the universe of U.S. patents filed between 1976 and 2010, we quantify how sensitive is migration by star scientist to changes in personal and business tax differentials across states. We uncover large, stable, and precisely estimated effects of personal and corporate taxes on star...

Empirical researchers interested in the causal effect of the endogenous regressor often use instrumental variables. When few valid instruments are available, they typically estimate restricted specifications that impose uniform per unit treatment effects, even when these effects are likely to...