Immigrants often have lower employment rates and earnings than natives. Our empirical analysis relies on two reforms generating exogenous variation in the waiting time for citizenship. We find that faster access to citizenship improves the economic situation of immigrant women, especially their labour market attachment with higher employment rates, longer working hours and more stable jobs. Immigrants also invest more in host country-specific skills like language and vocational training. Faster access to citizenship seems a powerful policy instrument to boost economic integration in countries ..read more

This article reports the results of a meta-study of 96 prisoner's dilemma studies comprising more than 3,500 participants. I disentangle the role of ‘risk’ (to co-operate unilaterally) and ‘temptation’ (to defect against a co-operator) and find that: (i) an index of risk best explains the variation in co-operation rates across one-shot games, while (ii) an index of temptation best explains the variation in finitely repeated games. Risk and temptation indices also affect gender comparisons. Women are more co-operative than the average man if risk is low and less co-operative if risk is high. Th ..read more

We exploit within-state variation across time in both the existence and length of statutory delays – both explicit wait periods and delays created by licensing requirements – between the purchase and delivery of a firearm to examine the effect of purchase delays on homicides and suicides. We find that the existence of a purchase delay reduces firearm-related suicides by between 2% and 5% with no statistically significant increase in non-firearm suicides. Purchase delays are not associated with statistically significant changes in homicide rates ..read more

This article estimates the effect of the oldest sister's education on child human capital development. In many developing countries, the oldest sisters share significant childcare responsibilities in the household and can influence younger siblings' learning. I propose a model that predicts competing effects of increasing the oldest sister's schooling on younger sibling human capital. Using an identification strategy that exploits the gender segregation of schools in Pakistan, I find that the oldest sister's schooling significantly improves younger brothers' literacy, numeracy and schooling. T ..read more

We propose an instrument to identify uncertainty shocks in a proxy structural vector autoregressive model (SVAR). The instrument equals the variations in the price of gold around events associated with unexpected changes in uncertainty. These variations correlate with uncertainty shocks because gold is perceived as a safe haven asset. To control for news-related effects associated with the events we identify uncertainty and news shocks jointly, developing a set-identified proxy SVAR. We find that the popular recursive approach underestimates the effects of uncertainty shocks and delivers respo ..read more

I exploit a reform that required Italian municipalities to disclose their balance sheets before elections to study whether having more informed voters affects the political budget cycle. Municipal investment in the year before elections is 28.5% higher than in electoral years, and the reform reduced this pre-electoral spending increase by one third. I then study the role of local newspapers in disseminating municipal financial information to voters and find that the effect of the reform is twice as large in areas with relatively many newspaper readers, suggesting that mayors react to more info ..read more

This study explores the historical determinants of the spread of Islam. Motivated by a plethora of historical accounts stressing the role of trade for the adoption of Islam, we construct detailed data on pre-Islamic trade routes to determine this empirical regularity. Our analysis establishes that proximity to the pre-600 CE trade network is a robust predictor of today's Muslim adherence across countries and ethnic groups in the Old World. We also show that Islam spread successfully in regions ecologically similar to the birthplace of the religion, the Arabian Peninsula, and discuss various me ..read more

We compare the welfare effects in equilibrium of two environmental regulations that aim at increasing the new cars fleet's average fuel efficiency: the fuel economy standards and the feebate policies. Maintaining the same environmental benefit and tax revenue, we simulate each policy in France and the US. Standard-type policies have larger negative welfare effects, up to 1.7 times those from the feebate. Effects on manufacturers are heterogeneous: some are better off under the feebate. A market to trade levels of fuel efficiency dominates the simple standard regulation and the feebate. We also ..read more

In this article, we propose an endogenous growth model of commodity-rich economies in which: (i) long-run (steady-state) growth is endogenous and yet independent of commodity prices; (ii) commodity prices affect short-run growth through transitional dynamics; and (iii) the status of net commodity importer/exporter is endogenous. We argue that these predictions are consistent with historical evidence from the 19th to the 21st century ..read more

I build and estimate a dynamic structural model of sectoral choices with heterogeneous workers accumulating imperfectly transferable human capital. Utility costs provide an additional barrier to mobility. Estimated by simulated minimum distance on administrative data covering the population of Danish workers, costs are found to be in the range from 10% to 19% of average annual wages. Removing permanent unobserved heterogeneity increases the utility costs by an order of magnitude. I show that both the imperfect transferability of human capital and the utility costs are important in explaining t ..read more