Estimating the Societal Value of Airport Slots

Books Go Public: The Consequences of the Expropriation of Monastic Libraries on Innovation

Access to useful knowledge is crucial for fostering modern economic growth. We show, for the first time, that knowledge accumulated and stored in monasteries was useful for innovation. In 1866, anticlerical legislation in Italy led to the suppression of religious orders, the expropriation of their properties, and the transfer of their manuscripts to local public libraries. From a contemporary survey on public libraries, we construct a unique dataset on municipalities which received monastic v...

The Alabaster Ceiling: The Gender Legacy of the Papal States

We investigate the legacy of the former Papal States on modern female condition by comparing Italian municipalities located in a narrow band across the border between the former Papal States and the former Grand Duchy of Tuscany. While in the Papal States gender inequality was particularly severe, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany experienced a relatively stronger female emancipation. We find that one century after the fall of the Papal States, in the municipalities formerly ruled by the Pope, there...

A Comment on the "Strategic Complexity and the Value of Thinking by D. Gill and V. Prowse (2023)"

Gill and Prowse (2023) study response times using a repeated p-beauty contest (p = 0.7). Looking at between-subject variation in response times, they found that subjects who think for longer, on average, win more rounds and choose lower numbers. When comparing average response times and level-k behavior, they observed that higher k types think for longer. In general, we are able to reproduce their findings, despite a minor coding error and some missing information. We test the robustness of t...