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The stock market influences some of the most fundamental economic decisions of investors, such as consumption, saving, and labor supply, through the financial wealth channel. This paper provides evidence that daily fluctuations in the stock market have important–and hitherto neglected–spillover effects in another, unrelated domain, namely driving. Using the universe of fatal road car accidents in the United States from 1990 to 2015, we find that a one standard deviation reduction in daily stock market returns is associated with a 0.5% increase in the number of fatal accidents. A battery of falsification tests support a causal interpretation of this finding. Our results are consistent with immediate emotions stirred by a negative stock market performance influencing the number of fatal accidents, in particular among inexperienced investors, thus highlighting the broader economic and social consequences of stock market fluctuations.

The paper gives an update to earlier analysis considering youth poverty and transition to adulthood, which is timely given the economic crisis engulfing many countries in Europe. Whereas, the crisis is affecting young people in particular, there is also huge variation across Europe. We document the short-term consequences of the current recession on the transition to adulthood of young Europeans, focusing on two main cornerstones in the transition to adulthood: economic independence and residential autonomy. We show an almost universal increase in financial hardship experienced by young adults during the recession, which is starting to translate into higher rates of co-residence with parents, hence delaying the process of leaving home and gaining economic independence. The economic recession will have a huge impact on young people and their the transition to adulthood. Economic deprivation and uncertainty will most likely delay the key markers of transition to adulthood.

People's childbearing intentions change over the course of their reproductive lives. These changes have been conceptualised as occurring in response to the realisation that an individual is unlikely to achieve his or her intended fertility, because of constraints such as the biological clock or lack of a partner. In this paper we find that changes to childbearing plans are actually influenced by a much wider range of factors than this. People change their plans in response to the wishes of their partners, in response to social norms, as the result of re-partnering, and as the result of learning about the costs and benefits of parenthood; there are also differences between the factors which influence men's and women's decision-making. A key feature of this paper is that, in a departure from existing studies in this area, we use a flexible analytical framework which enables us to analyse increases in planned fertility separately from decreases. This allows us to uncover several complexities of the decision-making process which would otherwise be hidden, and leads us to conclude that the determinants of increases in planned fertility are not simply equal and opposite to the determinants of decreases.

Does the gender of the mayor affect the size and composition of public expenditures and revenues? Do male and female mayors react differently to fiscal adjustments? Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design in close mixed gender races for the election of mayors in Italian municipalities in the period 2000-2015, we find that female mayors collect more revenues and spend more than male ones, both in the current and capital account. When constrained to fiscal adjustments by the central government, in a fuzzy difference-in-discontinuities design we find that female mayors reduce expenditures more than men.

Gender norms, i.e. the role of men and women in the society, are a fundamental channel through which culture may influence preferences for redistribution and public policies. We consider both cross-country and individual level evidence on this mechanism. We find that in countries that are historically more gender-equal the tax system today is more redistributive. At the individual level, we find that in more gender equal countries gender differences in redistributive preferences are significantly larger. This effect is driven by women becoming systematically more favorable to redistribution, while there are no significant changes for men. Interestingly, there is no gender-based difference in preferences for redistribution among left-leaning citizens, while this difference is significant among moderates in the expected direction: ideologically moderate women are more favorable to redistribution than moderate men, and this effect is even stronger among right-leaning individuals.

More educated parents are observed to have better educated children. Researchers trying to control for unobserved ability have found conflicting results: in most cases, they have found a strong positive paternal effect but a negligible maternal effect. In this paper, I use a population of twins from Norwegian Register data and evaluate the impact on the robustness of the estimates of the characteristics of the samples commonly used in this strand of research: samples of small size, with low variability in parental education, not randomly selected from the population. The part of the educational distribution involved in any identification strategy seems to be the key aspect to take into account to reconcile previous results from the literature.