The reduction of early school leaving to less than 10 percent of the relevant population by 2020 is a headline target in the Europe 2020 strategy and one of the five benchmarks of the strategic framework for European cooperation in education and training. Designing adequate policies to combat...

Subjective evaluations in many contexts might be affected by decision-makers' social preferences. To explore this phenomenon, we use data from soccer referees' decisions. According to soccer rules, referees are expected to evaluate each episode independently, without taking into account previous...

In the standard neoclassical model consumers use all the available information and the demand for goods depends exclusively on preferences and prices whereas other spurious information do not play any role. In the market for books, we investigate if – in contrast to the standard model – the...

We investigate the role of fatigue in soccer (football). Although this issue is important for the productivity of players and the optimal organization of national and international championships, empirical evidence is lacking. We use data on all the matches played by national teams in all the...

Economists have a poor understanding of the mechanisms underlying reduced-form college peer effects. In this paper we explore a candidate mechanism, the provision of school effort. We show that, when earnings reflect individual educational performance as well as the field of study selected at...

We conducted a field experiment involving 720 Italian undergraduate students to investigate the existence of gender differences in performance in competitive settings and whether performance is affected by one's opponent gender. The experimental design was aimed at disentangling gender...

Procrastination produces harmful effects for human capital investments and studying activities. Using data from a large sample of Italian undergraduates, we measure procrastination with the actual behaviour of students, considering the delay in finalizing their university enrolment procedure. We...

We investigate to what extent crowd support contributes to the home advantage in soccer, disentangling this effect from other mechanisms such as players' familiarity with the stadium and travel fatigue. To evaluate the relevance of crowd support in determining home advantage we analyze...

We investigate the role of culture in explaining economic outcomes at individual level analyzing how cultural values from the home country affect the decision to work of immigrants in Italy, using the National Survey of Households with Immigrants. Following the "epidemiological approach", we...

Product quality is often unobservable ex-ante and consumers rely on experts' judgments, sometimes in the form of ratings or awards. Do awards affect consumers' choices or, conversely, are they conferred on the most popular products? To disentangle this issue, we use data about the most important...