The adoption of labor-replacing technologies has already displaced thousands of workers in the US. In this paper, I analyze how the adverse effects of the implementation of robots in firms’ production processes are spreading among the population and how they are shaping the composition of labor markets. Exploiting exogenous variation in robot exposure across local labor markets and over time,...
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In: European Journal of Political Economy, 2021, vol. 67, p. 19 p
Natural disasters are good examples of catastrophic events that may affect vote decisions. In this study, we analyze how the occurrence of earthquakes changes voters' behavior at municipal elections and which channels drive this change, focusing in particular on the role of media exposure. We exploit data from 13,338 municipal electoral cycles where incumbents seek reelection between 1993 and...
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In: Corporate communications : an international journal, 2020, p. 18 p
Purpose – Corporations have to include increasingly CSR communication by responding to public procurement tenders because of the recently revised Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) concluded by the WTO. We argue that procurement tenders are to be seen as part of corporate communications, particularly when aligned with CSR reporting and performance indicators as proposed by the Global...
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The implementation of a lockdown to control the Covid-19 pandemic has led to a strong debate in several countries. This makes it crucial to shed light on the actual benefits of such kind of policy. To this purpose, we focus on the Swiss lockdown during the first wave of Covid-19 infections and estimate the number of potentially saved lives. To predict the number of deaths in absence of any...
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This paper analyzes the impact of one of the leading automation technologies of the last decades, industrial robots, on the declining labor force participation in the US. Exploiting exogenous variation in the adoption of robots across local labor markets and over time, I find that, on average, one additional robot drives two workers out of the labor force. Despite the adverse impact of robots,...
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(Working Papers SES ; 519)
We investigate the transnational transferability of statistical screening methods originally developed using Swiss data for detecting bid-rigging cartels in Japan. We find that combining screens for the distribution of bids in tenders with machine learning to classify collusive vs. competitive tenders entails a correct classification rate of 88% to 93% when training and testing the method...
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In: Journal of regional science, 2020, vol. 60, no. 3, p. 481-516
We analyze the response of municipalities to the occurrence of natural disasters in terms of spending behavior, use of upper tier transfers and recovery, using balance sheet data of about 8000 Italian municipalities for the period 2000-2015 and the universe of earthquakes events. We find evidence of increasing expenditure for about 12 years after the shocks, with asymmetric responses between...
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This paper studies gender-based price discrimination in the annuity market. The dataset consists of transaction-level data on the universe of individuals accessing the Chilean annuity market in the 2004-2017 period. It exploits the fact that, in Chile, individuals can access the annuity market through three different channels: an independent financial advisor, a sales agent at a company, or...
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(Working Papers SES ; 513)
We propose a new method for flagging bid rigging, which is particularly useful for detecting incomplete bid-rigging cartels. Our approach combines screens, i.e. statistics derived from the distribution of bids in a tender, with machine learning to predict the probability of collusion. As a methodological innovation, we calculate such screens for all possible subgroups of three or four bids...
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In: Sustainability, 2017, vol. 9, no. 5, p. 693
The advent of the digital economy and, implicitly, of competition in the online marketplace has triggered new challenges in terms of consumer protection approaches. Online, consumer skills are expected to be improved and the level of consumer awareness and engagement increased. These are the baseline prerequisites of the sustainable purchasing decision and, thus, should be considered as pillars...
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