In Chinese culture, those who are born in the year of the Dragon are believed to be destined for good fortune and greatness, and parents prefer their kids to be born in a Dragon year. Using provincial level panel data, we first show that the number of marriages goes up during the two years...

As an alternative to traditional venture capital investment, crowdfunding has emerged as a novel method and potentially disruptive innovation for financing a variety of new entrepreneurial ventures without standard financial intermediaries. It is still unknown to scholars and people who use...

To combat energy shortage, RIES has become an important research direction in the international energy field. In order to improve energy efficiency and the large-scale consumption of renewable energy, this paper presents the key technologies of RIES, which consists of the coupling relationship,...

The fear and hatred of others who are different has economic consequences because such feelings are likely to translate into discrimination in labor, credit, housing, and other markets. The implications range from earnings inequality to intergenerational mobility. Using German data from various...

We exploit information on compulsory schooling reforms in 11 European countries, implemented mostly in the 1960s and 70s, to identify the impact of education on religious adherence and religious practices. Using micro data from the European Social Survey, conducted in various years between 2002...

We use micro data from the European Social Survey to investigate the impact of "culture of leisure" and taxes on labor force participation and hours worked of second-generation immigrants who reside in 26 European countries. These individuals are born in Europe, and they have been exposed to...

We exploit the randomness generated by a seat allocation mechanism utilized in Parliamentary elections that determines those politicians who get elected from a given district by a small margin, and those who lose. Using detailed information on personal attributes of more than 2,000 elected...

Using a nationally-representative panel data set of U.S. high school students (AddHealth data) that contains a relatively large sample of siblings and twins, the paper investigates the impacts of gun availability at home and individual drug use on robbery, burglary, theft and damaging property...

This paper uses a rich employer-employee matched data set to investigate the existence and the extent of nonprofit and part-time wage and compensation differentials in child care. The empirical strategy adjusts for workers? self-selection into the for-profit or nonprofit sectors, into full-time...

Although there is a sizeable literature of the effect of private school attendance on academic student outcomes, there is a dearth of studies of the impact of school sector on nonacademic outcomes. Using a rich data set, we analyze the impact of Catholic school attendance on the likelihood that...