This paper contributes to the literature on the costs of conflict, focusing on the important channel of its effect on food security. It does this by examining whether people in conflict zones lack sufficient food and whether this can be directly attributed to armed conflicts. It uses the...

This paper evaluates the wage effects of a tax credit policy on new hirings in Southern Italy. We use high-quality administrative data and propose a latent class inverse probability weighting method as a strategy to account for workers' unobserved heterogeneity. We find an unexpected negative...

The predictions that economic freedom is beneficial in reducing corruption have not been found to be universally robust in empirical studies. The present work reviews this relationship by using firms' data in a cross-country survey and argues that approaches using aggregated macro data have not...

The predictions that economic freedom is beneficial in reducing corruption have not been found to be universally robust in empirical studies. The present work reviews this relationship by using firms' data in a cross-country survey and argues that approaches using aggregated macro data have not...

The predictions that economic freedom is beneficial in reducing corruption have not been found to be universally robust in empirical studies. The present work reviews this relationship by using firms’ data in a cross-country survey and argues that approaches using aggregated data have not been...

In this paper we examine the role of relative food prices in determining the recent increase in body weight in Italy. Cross-price elasticities of unhealthy and healthy foods estimated by a demand system provide a consistent framework to evaluate substitution effects, when a close association is...

This paper explores the interactions between the risk of food insecurity and the decision to health insure in the Palestinian Territories. The risk of adverse health conditions is insurable; the risk of food insecurity is a background risk and no market insurance exists. The vulnerability to food...

This work examines the socio-economic determinants of body weight in the United Kingdom by means of two recent waves from the British Household Panel Survey. While the patterns of overweight and obesity have drawn economists’ interest in recent years, our main contribution is to examine the...

This paper considers the effects of corruption and government spending on economic growth. It starts from an endogenous growth model and extends it to account for the detrimental effects of corruption on the potentially productive components of government spending, namely military and investment...

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...