The attractiveness of the Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) in its sharp formulation rests on close similarities with a formal experimental design. On the other hand, it is of limited applicability since rarely individuals are assigned to the treatment group on the basis of a pre-program...

In this paper we study the impact of misreported treatment status on the estimation of causal treatment effects. We characterise the bias introduced by misclassification on the average treatment effect on the treated under the assumption of selection on observables. Although the bias of...

This paper investigates the short term effects of a large scale intervention, funded by the European Social Fund, that provides additional instruction time to students in low achieving lower secondary schools of Southern Italy. We control for sorting across classes using the fact that freshman...

In this paper we investigate the size of the consumption drop at retirement in Italy. We use micro data on food and total non-durable household spending covering the period 1993-2004, and evaluate the change in consumption that accompanies retirement by exploiting the exogenous variability in...

We study food Engel curves among the poor population targeted by a conditional cash transfer programme in Colombia. After controlling for the endogeneity of total expenditure and for the (unobserved) variability of prices across villages, the best fit is provided by a log-linear specification....

In this paper we study top executive turnover in Italian Banks over the period 1993-2001. We relate the probability of survival of top executives (Presidents, CEOs and General Managers) to bank performance and the manager's local connections, controlling for (observable and unobservable) bank...

Significant departures from log normality are observed in income data, in violation of Gibrat’s law. We identify a new empirical regularity, which is that the distribution of consumption expenditures across households is, within cohorts, closer to log normal than the distribution of income. We...

Current labour force counting relies on general guidelines set by the International Labour Office(ILO) to classify individuals into three labour force states: employment, unemployment and in activity. However, the resulting statistics areknown to be sensitive to slight variations of operational...

This paper considers data quality issues for the analysis of consumption inequality exploiting two complementary datasets from the Consumer Expenditure Survey for the United States. The Interview sample follows survey households over four calendar quarters and consists of retrospectively asked...