Does Parental Divorce Affect Adolescents' Cognitive Development? Evidence from Longitudinal Data In this paper we analyse data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 to investigate whether experiencing parental divorce during adolescence reduces measured cognitive ability. To account for the potential endogeneity of parental divorce we employ a difference-in-differences model th...

Despite biogas is considered a renewable source of energy, the social acceptability of biogas plants is controversial due to resistance from local communities who are afraid of potential local negative externalities. This paper aim at investigating this claim using evidence from the housing market by means of a diff-in-diff model. Indeed, if households evaluate the presence of biogas plant such...

This paper uses a quasi-experimental approach to test the hypothesis that the political gender gap is driven by rising divorce risk. We exploit a largely unexpected legal change in Britain, the White v White case, which in 2000 established a rule of parity for the split of assets upon divorce. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that the gender gap in political preferences decli...

We examine whether property price differentials reflecting flood risk increase following a large flood event, and whether this change is temporary or permanent. We use single-family residential property sales in Dougherty County, Georgia, between 1985 and 2004 in a difference-in-differences spatial hedonic model framework. After the 1994 “flood of the century,” prices of properties in the 100ye...

We examine whether regulation intended to improve disclosure can itself lead to higher disclosure quality in the absence of a change in preparer incentives. We exploit a setting involving a sequence of two similar regulatory changes, which have one key difference – while both regulatory changes mandate improvements to disclosure (specifically, on pension asset allocation), only one removes prep...

This paper uses a quasi-experimental framework provided by recent changes in Russian corporate law to study the effect of investor protection on the value of shares. The legal change analyzed involves the empowerment of preferred (non-voting) shareholders to veto unfavorable changes in their class rights. Based on a novel hand-collected dataset of dual class stock companies in Russia and using ...

In this paper we use important new training and wage data from the British Household Panel Survey to estimate the impact of the national minimum wage (introduced in April 1999) on the work-related training of low-wage workers. We use two ‘treatment groups’ for estimating the impact of the new minimum wage – those workers who explicitly stated they were affected by the new minimum and those work...

Does Joining the EU Make You Happy? Evidence from Bulgaria and Romania* We examine the effect of joining the European Union on individual life satisfaction in Bulgaria and Romania in the context of the 2007 EU enlargement. Although EU membership is among the most important events in Bulgaria and Romania’s modern histories, there is no evidence on how it affected the subjective well-being of ord...

Electronic voting technology is often proposed as translating voter intent to vote totals better than alternative systems such as paper ballots. We suggest that EVMs can also alter vote choice, and in particular the way in which voters register anti-system sentiment. This paper examines the effects of the introduction of electronic voting machines in India, the world’s largest democracy, using ...

We study the conditions to identify the joint distribution of outcomes for the treated group in absence of any treatment, avoiding to make assumptions that allow to identify each counterfactual marginal distribution. Our starting point is Athey & Imbens (2006)’s Changes-In-Changes Model, but we generalize it letting the treatment also affect the distribution of unobservables even within each gr...