1,721,266 research outputs found
Hungry Today, Unhappy Tomorrow? Childhood Hunger and Subjective Wellbeing Later in Life.
No full textI use anchoring vignettes to show that, on data for eleven European countries, exposure to episodes of hunger in childhood leads people to adopt lower subjective standards to evaluate satisfaction with life in adulthood. I also show that, as a consequence, estimates of the association between childhood starvation and late-life wellbeing that do not allow for reporting heterogeneity are biased towards finding a positive correlation. These results highlight the need to consider rescaling when drawing inference on subjective outcomes
Four Essays in Empirical Economics
Full text linkThis thesis is a collection of four essays in empirical economics.
The first chapter is titled "When the Cat Is Near, the Mice Won’t Play: The Effect of External Examiners in Italian Schools". This paper is co-authored with Giorgio Brunello and Lorenzo Rocco. In this study, we use a natural experiment to show that the presence of an external examiner has both a direct and an indirect negative effect on the performance of monitored classes in standardized educational tests. The direct effect is the difference in the test performance between classes of the same school with and without external examiners. The indirect effect is the difference in performance between un-monitored classes in schools with an external examiner and un-monitored classes in schools without external monitoring. We find that the overall effect of having an external examiner in the class is to reduce the proportion of correct answers by 5.5 to 8.5% - depending on the grade and the test - with respect to classes in schools with no external monitor. The direct and indirect effects range between 4.3 and 6.6% and between 1.2 and 1.9% respectively. Using additional supporting evidence, we argue that the negative impact of the presence of an external examiner on measured test scores is due to reduced cheating (by students and/or teachers) rather than to the negative effects of anxiety or distraction from having a stranger in the class.
The second chapter is titled "Selection and the Age - Productivity Profile. Evidence from Chess Players", and is also co-authored with Giorgio Brunello and Lorenzo Rocco.We use data on professional chess tournaments to study how endogenous selection affects the relationship between age and mental productivity in a brain-intensive profession. We show that less talented players are more likely to drop out, and that the age-productivity gradient is heterogeneous by ability, making fixed effects estimators inconsistent. We correct for selection using an imputation procedure that repopulates the sample by applying to older cohorts the self-selection patterns observed in younger cohorts. We estimate the age-productivity profile on the repopulated sample using median regressions, and find that median productivity increases by close to 5 percent from initial age (15) to peak age (21), and declines substantially after the peak. At age 50, it is about 10 percent lower than at age 15. We compare profiles in the unadjusted and in the repopulated sample and show that failure to adequately address endogenous selection in the former leads to substantially over-estimating productivity at any age relative to initial age.
The third chapter is titled "Laterborns Don’t Give Up. The Effects of Birth Order on Earnings in Europe", and is joint work with Giorgio Brunello. While it is well known that birth order affects educational attainment, less is known about its effects on earnings. Using data from eleven European countries for males born between 1935 and 1956, we show that firstborns enjoy on average a 13.7 percent premium over laterborns in their wage at labour market entry. However, this advantage is short lived, and disappears by age 30, between 10 and 15 years after labour market entry. While firstborns start with a better match, partly because of their higher education, laterborns quickly catch up by switching earlier and more frequently to better paying jobs. We argue that a key factor driving our findings is that laterborns are more likely to engage in risky behaviours.
The fourth chapter is single-authored, and is titled " Hungry Today, Happy Tomorrow? Childhood Conditions and Self-Reported Wellbeing Later in Life". In this work, I use anchoring vignettes to show that, on data for eleven European countries, exposure to episodes of hunger in childhood leads people to adopt lower subjective reference points to evaluate satisfaction with life in adulthood. This is consistent with the satisfaction treadmill theory of hedonic adaptation, and highlights that failure to consider reporting heterogeneity will result in downward-biased estimates of the negative effects of starvation in childhood on the levels of wellbeing later in life. These findings underline the importance of considering issues of interpersonal comparability when studying the determinants of subjective wellbein
Later-borns Don’t Give Up: The Temporary Effects of Birth Order on European Earnings
Full text linkThe existing empirical evidence on the effects of birth order on wages does not distinguish between temporary and permanent effects. Using data from 11 European countries for males born between 1935 and 1956, we show that firstborns enjoy on average a 13.7 % premium in their entry wage compared with later-borns. This advantage, however, is short-lived and disappears 10 years after labor market entry. Although firstborns start with a better job, partially because of their higher education, later-borns quickly catch up by switching earlier and more frequently to better-paying jobs. We argue that a key factor driving our findings is that later-borns have lower risk aversion than firstborns
Pappa Ante Portas: The effect of the husband's retirement on the wife's mental health in Japan
Full text linkThe “Retired Husband Syndrome”, that affects the mental health of wives of retired men around the world, has been anecdotally documented but never formally investigated. Using Japanese micro-data and the exogenous variation across cohorts in the maximum age of guaranteed employment induced by a 2006 Japanese reform, we estimate that the husband's earlier retirement significantly increases the probability that the wife reports symptoms related to the syndrome. We also find that retirement has a negative effect both on the household's economic situation and on the husband's own mental health, and that the higher economic distress contributes to reducing the wife's mental health
Representing and sharing knowledge in PLM system design
No full textThe main aim of this paper is to contribute in leveraging the rate of success of BPR in a Virtual Enterprise environment by proposing a framework supporting PLM system designers in selecting the best communication tool to be used in reengineering. The aim of the framework is to enhance interoperability between users, process owners and knowledge experts in design, by proposing a set of guidelines for the use of process modelling languages when dealing with the definition of PLM system specifications. This work has been conducted within the EU 6th Framework Programme VIVACE Project (Value Improvement through a Virtual Aeronautical Collaborative Enterprise) with the purpose to support the design and implementation of a Knowledge Enabled Engineering system able to improve product development process performances by leveraging past design experience.Godkänd; 2008; 20080507 (berber
When do ordinal ability rank effects emerge? Evidence from the timing of school closures
Full text linkWe leverage the timing of pandemic-induced school closures to learn about the emergence of ordinal rank effects in education. Using administrative data from Italian middle schools for four cohorts of students, our study reveals that disrupting peer interactions during the first year of middle school – when students are still unfamiliar with one another – substantially diminishes the impact of ordinal rank on test scores. Instead, later interruptions to peer interactions do not significantly affect the strength of these interpersonal comparisons
Avoiding resonant frequencies in a pipeline application by utilising the concept design analysis method
No full textAvoiding disasters due to the problems stemming from resonance is a major concern in any construction project. This becomes particularly important for oil and gas pipeline systems as some damages may lead to leakage of flammable fluids, explosions, fires, destruction and loss of life. The proximity to the natural frequencies of forced frequencies (frequency ratio) normally leads to intolerant resonant vibrations and catastrophic failures. A relevant case study on a partial pipeline design with an unacceptable level of frequency ratio is presented. In order to assess the overall design merit of the case study, the Concept Design Analysis (CODA) method is utilised to map captured Customer Needs (CNs) into Engineering Characteristics (ECs). As the frequency ratio is an important EC of the whole system, the improved CODA method for the pipeline design introduces an avoidance type merit function that allows excluding a range of relevant ECs. This improved CODA method is demonstrated in a model whereby certain frequency ratios are successfully avoided in the final desig
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