Is there a rational component in the decision to commit suicide? Economists have been trying to shed light on this question by studying whether suicide rates are related to contemporaneous conditions. This paper goes one step further: we test whether suicides are linked to forward-looking...

It is well-known in the literature that income per capita is strongly correlated with the level of democracy across countries. In an influential paper, Acemoglu et al. (2008) find that this linear correlation disappears once they control for country-specific effects focusing on within-country...

This paper analyzes the impact of downward wage rigidity on the labor market. It shows that imposing downward wage rigidity in a matching model with cyclical fluctuations in productivity, endogenous match-destruction, and on-the-job search, quits are procyclical and layoffs countercyclical. It...

In standard equilibrium search models with strategic wage bargaining and on-the-job search, renegotiation is permitted without requirement of a credible threat. Workers trigger renegotiation whenever they have a new outside option that could raise their wages. In this note I modify the model to...

We estimate the causal effect of immigrants' legal status on criminal behavior exploiting exogenous variation in migration restrictions across nationalities driven by the last round of the European Union enlargement. Unique individual-level data on a collective clemency bill enacted in Italy...

Based on unique data on individual bank robberies perpetrated in Italy between 2005 and 2007, this paper estimates the distribution of criminals' disutility of jail. The identification rests on the money versus risk trade-off criminals face when deciding whether to stay an additional minute...

Using unique data on criminal profiles of 800 US Mafia members active in the 50s and 60s and on their connections within the Cosa Nostra network we analyze how the geometry of criminal ties between mobsters depends on family ties, community roots and ties, legal and illegal activities. We...

We study how the closeness of electoral race affect the number of invalid ballots under the traditional paper-ballot voting technology. Using a large dataset from the Italian parliamentary elections in 1994-2001, we find a strong positive correlation between the closeness of electoral race and...

This article uses survey data of 90,000 union employees working in 62 publicly-traded companies in Japan between 1990 and 2004 to study the effect of both own and self-reported reference wages on workers' subjective well-being levels. The availability of self-reported reference wages generates...