In this paper we investigate the existence and the size of territorial differences in Italian students' mathematical competencies. Our analysis benefits from a new data set that merges the 2003 wave of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) with territorial data collected...

Building upon some education studies finding that cooperative behaviour in class yields better achievements among students, this paper presents a simple model showing that free riding incentives lead to an insufficient degree of cooperation between schoolmates, which in turn decreases the...

Many experimental studies and surveys have shown that women consistently display more risk-averse behavior than men when confronted with decisions involving risk. These differences in risk preferences, when combined with gender differences in other behavioral traits, such as fondness for...

We investigate how risk aversion (RA) shapes the informative content of prices in an experimental asset market, where traders are sorted according to their RA. RA should induce steeper individual demands and, under its most common parametrizations, drive equilibrium prices closer to revealing...

The paper explores the role of workers? expectations as an original explanation for the puzzling long run persistence of observed discrimination against some minorities in the labor market. A game of incomplete information is presented, showing that ex ante identical groups of workers may be...

This paper is an experimental analysis of the role played by workers? expectations in explaining the puzzling long-run persistence of observed discrimination against certain minorities in the labor market. The experiment provides some evidence supporting the theoretical prediction that unequal...

This paper explores the extent to which the gender wage gap is anticipated by workers' expectations. Data collected among second year students of Bocconi University convey information about their wage expectations. Detailed controls allow a clean matching with a sample of Bocconi graduates...

The paper explains how workers' expectations of being discriminated against can be self-confirming, accounting for the persistence of unequal outcomes in the labour market even beyond the causes that originally generated them. The theoretical framework used is a two-stage game of incomplete...

This paper presents the Bomb Risk Elicitation Task (BRET), an intuitive procedure aimed at measuring risk attitudes. Subjects decide how many boxes to collect out of 100, one of which containing a bomb. Earnings increase linearly with the number of boxes accumulated but are zero if the bomb is...

We perform a comparative analysis of five incentivized tasks used to elicit risk preferences. Theoretically, we compare the elicitation methods in terms of completeness of the range of the estimates as well as their precision, the likelihood of triggering loss aversion, and problems arising when...