The paper investigates the link between corruption and efficiency by using a rich micro-level dataset concerning solid waste collection activities in 529 Italian municipalities observed over the years 2004-2006. In order to test the impact of corruption on cost efficiency we estimate a...

The focus of the paper is to analyze the costs of solid waste collection by applying a well-behaved multi-product cost function model to a sample of more than 500 Italian municipalities. Beyond shedding light on the presence and on the extent of size (or scale) economies, our aim is to...

We empirically investigate the local labor market determinants of female decisions of investing in post-secondary education, focusing on the role of career interruptions and barriers to job promotions. We use EU-Silc data on educational decisions of women who completed secondary schooling. We...

Childcare arrangements are key in women's ability to juggle motherhood and working outside the home. As such, the study of the access to childcare and its use is of great policy relevance. We focus on a particular kind of informal childcare, the one provided by grandparents. Empirically,...

We show how the common occurrence of seeing exceedingly high claims in disputes and litigations about how to share a limited resource can be rationalized by a model in which claimants display reference dependent preferences, expect the judge to use a generalized social welfare function, and...

We present an endogenous timing game of action commitment in which play- ers can steal from each other parts of a homogeneous and perfectly divisible pie and the expected effectiveness of a player?s theft is proportional to the amount he currently owns. We show how the incentives to preempt or...

This paper provides a multiple-priors representation of ambiguous beliefs à la Ghirardato, Maccheroni, and Marinacci (2004) and Nehring (2002) for any preference that is (i) monotonic, (ii) Bernoullian, i.e. admits an affine utility representation when restricted to constant acts, and (iii)...

From the perspective of someone who is both an economist and a former school board member, this paper assesses the use of test-score data by policy-makers and academic researchers. The absence of interval scales often makes the interpretation of test-scores and the indicators derived from them...

We propose an occupational choice model in which the quality of the state bureaucracy influences aggregate output and the level of entrepreneurial activity through its participation in the labour market. Skilled agents differ in terms of their public service motivation: if agents with low public...

The growth in labor market participation among women with young children has raised concerns about the potential negative impact of the mother's absence from home on child outcomes. Recent data show that mother's time spent with children has declined in the last decade, while the indicators of...