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Background: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused a global health crisis and it might have affected healthcare-associated infections (HAI) prevention strategies. This study aims to evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on HAI incidence in Brazilian ICUs. Methods: This ecological study compared adult patients admitted to the ICU from April through June 2020 (pandemic period) with the same period in 2019 (pre-pandemic period). We collected data from 21 hospitals from the three most populated Brazilian regions. The difference in microbiologically confirmed central line-associated bloodstream infection (CLABSI) and ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) incidence density, and the proportion of organisms that caused HAI between the pandemic and the pre-pandemic periods were compared in a pairwise analysis using the Wilcoxon signed rank sum test. Findings: We observed a significant increase in CLABSI incidence during the pandemic (2.81 [1.35 - 6.89] vs. 1.60 [0.44 - 4.20], p = 0.002). Overall, there was no difference in VAP incidence between the two periods, but there was an increase in VAP incidence in private hospitals during the pandemic (3.65 [1.42 - 6.57] vs. 2.54 [0 - 3.98], p = 0.033). In addition, there was a significant increase in the proportion of CLABSI caused by Enterococcus faecalis and candida species during the pandemic. Interpretation: There was an increase in CLABSI incidence in Brazilian hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, we observed an increase in the proportion of CLABSI caused by E. faecalis and candida species in this period. Funding: None. Declaration of Interests: None. Ethics Approval Statement: The study protocol 77243517.8 was approved by the ethics committee of each participating hospital.

We study the effect of exposure to immigrants on the educational outcomes of US-born students, using a unique dataset combining population-level birth and school records from Florida. This research question is complicated by substantial school selection of US-born students, especially among White and comparatively affluent students, in response to the presence of immigrant students in the school. We propose a new identification strategy to partial out the unobserved non-random selection into schools, and find that the presence of immigrant students has a positive effect on the academic achievement of US-born students, especially for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Moreover, the presence of immigrants does not affect negatively the performance of affluent US-born students, who typically show a higher academic achievement compared to immigrant students. We provide suggestive evidence on potential channels. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Author(s): Giuliano, Paola; Sapienza, Paola | Abstract: We study the cost of being too patient on happiness. We find that the relationship between patience and various measures of subjective well-being is hump-shaped: there exists an optimal amount of patience that maximizes happiness. Beyond this optimal level, higher levels of patience have a negative impact on well-being.

The success of non-pharmaceutical interventions to contain pandemics often depends greatly upon voluntary compliance with government guidelines. What explains variation in voluntary compliance? Using mobile phone and survey data, we show that during the early phases of COVID-19, voluntary social distancing was higher when individuals exhibit a higher sense of civic duty. This is true for U.S. individuals, U.S. counties, and European regions. We also show that after U.S. states began re-opening, social distancing remained more prevalent in high civic capital counties. Our evidence points to the importance of civic capital in designing public policy responses to pandemics.

We study the effect of preferences for boys on the performance in mathematics of girls, using evidence from two different data sources. In our first set of results, we identify families with a preference for boys by using fertility stopping rules in a large population of households whose children attend public schools in Florida. Girls growing up in a boy-biased family score on average 3 percentage points lower on math tests when compared to girls raised in other types of families. In our second set of results, we find similar effects when we study the correlations between girls’ performance in mathematics and maternal gender role attitudes, using evidence from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. We conclude that socialization at home can explain a non-trivial part of the observed gender disparities in mathematics performance and document that maternal gender attitudes correlate with those of their children, supporting the hypothesis that preferences transmitted through the family impact children behavior.

Entering a currency union without any political union European countries have taken a gamble: will the needs of the currency union force a political integration (as anticipated by Monnet) or will the tensions create a backlash, as suggested by Kaldor, Friedman and many others? We try to answer this question by analyzing the cross sectional and time series variation in pro-European sentiments in the EU 15 countries. The 1992 Maastricht Treaty seems to have reduced the pro-Europe sentiment as does the 2010 Eurozone crisis. Yet, in spite of the worst recession in recent history, the Europeans still support the common currency. Europe seems trapped: there is no desire to go backward, no interest in going forward, but it is economically unsustainable to stay still.

While both cultural and legal norms (institutions) help foster cooperation, culture is the more primitive of the two and itself sustains formal institutions. Cultural changes are rarer and slower than changes in legal institutions, which makes it difficult to identify the role played by culture. Cultural changes and their effects are easier to identify in simpler, more controlled, environments, such as corporations. Corporate culture, thus, is not only interesting per se, but also as a laboratory to study the role of societal culture and the way it can be changed.

The non-statutory executive power of Australia's Commonwealth government is firmly back on Australia's public law agenda. Even before the events at sea that gave rise to the case of CPCF v. Minister for Immigration and Border Protection (now reserved before the High Court), the government was making plans to give other decisions relating to asylum-seekers a "non-statutory" footing, with the apparent aim of rendering the decisions less amenable to judicial review. This paper (an extended and updated version of a paper delivered at the 2014 AIAL National Administrative Law Conference on 24 July 2014) examines whether it is possible, in Australia's migration law setting, to make decisions relating to refugee protection "non-statutory" and, if it is, whether such decisions would be justiciable. In doing so, the paper provides analysis of important High Court decisions such as Plaintiff M61E v. Commonwealth (2010) and Plaintiff S10/2011 v. Minister for Immigration and Citizenship (2012) as well as recent intermediate court decisions. It also assesses government proposals against what the considers are the four modern principles of justiciability of non-statutory executive action: the public power principle (including outsourcing issues), the subject matter principle, the affectation principle and the decision-maker principle. The paper ultimately concludes that the Commonwealth government is unlikely to be able to place reviews of refugee decisions on a non-statutory footing and that, even if it could, most claims arising from such reviews are likely to be justiciable in any event.

We study which dimensions of corporate culture are related to a firm’s performance and why. We find that proclaimed values appear irrelevant. Yet, when employees perceive top managers as trustworthy and ethical, firm’s performance is stronger. We then study how different governance structures impact the ability to sustain integrity as a corporate value. We find that publicly traded firms are less able to sustain it. Traditional measures of corporate governance do not seem to have much of an impact.

We use a repeated survey of an Italian bank’s clients to test whether investors’ risk aversion increases following the 2008 financial crisis. We find that both a qualitative and a quantitative measure of risk aversion increases substantially after the crisis. After considering standard explanations, we investigate whether this increase might be an emotional response (fear) triggered by a scary experience. To show the plausibility of this conjecture, we conduct a lab experiment. We find that subjects who watched a horror movie have a certainty equivalent that is 27% lower than the ones who did not, supporting the fear-based explanation. Finally, we test the fear-based model with actual trading behavior and find consistent evidence.

In 2012 the National Public Radio program Planet Money created a fake presidential platform based on the issues a small sample of economists, with different political views, agreed upon. In focus groups this platform found no support among the public at large. Is this just a feature of the particular selection made by NPR or is it a generalizable feature? If so, is this because ordinary people have not being trained in economics or because economists lack common sense or miss important political considerations?In this article we try to address these questions. To do so we compare the answers to a common set of policy questions provided by the Economic Expert Panel at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business (EEP) with those provided by the Chicago Booth/Kellogg School Financial Trust Index (FTI), which quarterly interviews a representative sample of the U.S. population. Economists’ opinions differ greatly from those of other ordinary Americans: On average the percentage of agreement with a statement differs 35 percentage points between the two groups. This difference does not seem to be driven by a different composition of the sample.We also find a large variation in the difference between the two samples across questions. The topics most covered in the economic literature, where economists agree among themselves the most, are also the topics in which their opinions are most distant from those of average Americans. This difference does not seem to be driven by knowledge, since informing people of the expert opinions does not have much impact on the responses of ordinary Americans. The explanation most consistent with our limited evidence is that people do not trust many of the implicit assumptions embedded into the economists’ answers and that economists give them for granted.

We use survey data to study American households’ propensity to default when the value of their mortgage exceeds the value of their house even if they can afford to pay their mortgage (strategic default). We find that 26% of the existing defaults are strategic. We also find that no household would default if the equity shortfall is less than 10% of the value of the house. Yet, 17% of households would default, even if they can afford to pay their mortgage, when the equity shortfall reaches 50% of the value of their house. Besides relocation costs, the most important variables in predicting strategic default are moral and social considerations. Ceteris paribus, people who consider it immoral to default are 77% less likely to declare their intention to do so, while people who know someone who defaulted are 82% more likely to declare their intention to do so. The willingness to default increases nonlinearly with the proportion of foreclosures in the same ZIP code. That moral attitudes toward default do not change with the percentage of foreclosures in the area suggests that the correlation between willingness to default and percentage of foreclosures is likely to derive from a contagion effect that reduces the social stigma associated with default as defaults become more common.

We conduct a field experiment to test whether (and how) emotional intelligence can be taught effectively in a short course. We randomly assign MBA students to an emotional intelligence course, a resiliency course, and a “placebo” course. We compare their emotional intelligences, as measured by the MSCEIT, before and after the sixteen-hour course. We find that students in the emotional intelligence course increase their MSCEIT score by 5 standard score points, students in the resiliency course by 4 standard score points, while students in the placebo course show no change. Furthermore, in the emotional intelligence course this improvement is positively related to class attendance. Students who never missed class increase their MSCEIT score by 10 standard score points.

Is social capital long lasting? Does it affect long term economic performance? To answer these questions we test Putnam's conjecture that today marked differences in social capital between the North and South of Italy were due to the culture of independence fostered by the free city-states experience in the North of Italy at the turn of the first millennium. We show that the medieval experience of independence has an impact on social capital within the North, even when we instrument for the probability of becoming a city-state with historical factors (such as the Etruscan origin of the city and the presence of a bishop in year 1,000). More importantly, we show that the difference in social capital among towns that in the Middle Ages had the characteristics to become independent and towns that did not exists only in the North (where most of these towns became independent) and not in the South (where the power of the Norman kingdom prevented them from doing so). Our difference in difference estimates suggest that at least 50% of the North-South gap in social capital is due to the lack of a free city-state experience in the South.

There is a large body of literature documenting both a preference for immediacy and a tendency to procrastinate. O'Donoghue and Rabin (1999a,b, 2001) and Choi et al. (2005) model these behaviors as two faces of the same phenomenon. In this paper, we use a combination of lab, field, and survey evidence to study whether these two types of behavior are indeed linked. To measure immediacy we had subjects choose between a series of smaller-sooner and larger-later rewards. Both rewards were paid with a check in order to control for transaction costs. To measure procrastination we use the subjects' actual behavior in cashing the check and completing tasks on time. Our results lend support to the hypothesis that subjects who have a preference for immediacy are indeed more likely to procrastinate.

We compare the trading performance of independent directors and other officers of the firm. We find that independent directors earn positive and substantial abnormal returns when they purchase their company stock, and that the difference with the same firm's officers is relatively small at most horizons. The results are robust to controlling for firm fixed effects and to using a variety of alternative specifications. Executive officers and independent directors make higher returns in firms with weaker governance and the gap between these two groups widens in such firms. Independent directors who sit in audit committees earn higher return than other independent directors at the same firm. Finally, independent directors earn significantly higher returns than the market when they sell the company stock in a window before bad news and around a restatement announcement.

This paper investigates the effect of corporate governance reforms on the balance between ownership and control in a country characterized by poor investor protection. We use the example of Italy, where major reforms were passed in 1998 to protect minority shareholders from the risks of expropriation on account of the exercise of high voting rights (or high control) by the ultimate owner despite low cash flow rights (or low ownership). Using a two-stage longitudinal research design incorporating both quantitative and qualitative analyses (1995-2005), we find that reforms led to improved disclosure and greater representation of minority shareholders. In turn, this led to a decline in the risk of expropriation of minority shareholders. The reforms had a greater effect on firms where an institutional investor was present. We also find that while reforms led to an increase in the cash flow rights of the ultimate owner, they did not lead to a decrease in voting rights. This paper highlights the importance of studying the mechanisms by which the content of reforms affects actual business practices through the use of longitudinal research designs and the crucial role played by institutional investors in improving governance practices of firms. This paper also suggests that corporate governance reforms are more likely to be successful when regulatory coercion is accompanied by provisions that facilitate market-based control mechanisms.

To explain the extremely long-term persistence (more than 500 years) of positive historical experiences of cooperation (Putnam 1993), we model the intergenerational transmission of priors about the trustworthiness of others. We show that this transmission tends to be biased toward excessively conservative priors. As a result, societies can be trapped in a low-trust equilibrium. In this context, a temporary shock to the return to trusting can have a permanent effect on the level of trust. We validate the model by testing its predictions on the World Values Survey data and the German Socio Economic Panel. We also present some anecdotal evidence that differences in priors across regions are reflected in the spirit of the novels that originate from those regions.

We provide a new explanation to the limited stock market participation puzzle. In deciding whether to buy stocks, investors factor in the risk of being cheated. The perception of this risk is a function not only of the objective characteristics of the stock, but also of the subjective characteristics of the investor. Less trusting individuals are less likely to buy stock and, conditional on buying stock, they will buy less. The calibration of the model shows that this problem is sufficiently severe to account for the lack of participation of some of the richest investors in the United States as well as for differences in the rate of participation across countries. We also find evidence consistent with these propositions in Dutch and Italian micro data, as well as in cross country data.

We use exogenous variation in the degree of restrictions to bank competition across Italian provinces to study both the effects of bank regulation and the impact of deregulation. We find that where entry was more restricted the cost of credit was higher and - contrary to expectations- access to credit lower. The only benefit of these restrictions was a lower proportion of bad loans. Liberalization brings a reduction in rates spreads and an increased access to credit at a cost of an increase in bad loans. In provinces where restrictions to bank competition were most severe, the proportion of bad loans after deregulation raises above the level present in more competitive markets, suggesting that the pre-existing conditions severely impact the effect of liberalizations.

How much do cultural biases affect economic exchange? We try to answer this question by using the relative trust European citizens have for citizens of other countries. First, we document that this trust is affected not only by objective characteristics of the country being trusted, but also by cultural aspects such as religion, a history of conflicts, and genetic similarities. We then find that lower relative levels of trust toward citizens of a country lead to less trade with that country, less portfolio investment, and less direct investment in that country, even after controlling for the objective characteristics of that country. This effect is stronger for good that are more trust intensive and doubles or triples when trust is instrumented with its cultural determinants. We conclude that perceptions rooted in culture are important (and generally omitted) determinants of economic exchange.

We study the effects of differences in local financial development within an integrated financial market. To do so, we construct a new indicator of financial development by estimating a regional effect on the probability that, ceteris paribus, a household is shut off from the credit market. By using this indicator we find that financial development enhances the probability an individual starts his own business, favors entry, increases competition, and promotes growth of firms. As predicted by theory, these effects are weaker for larger firms, which can more easily raise funds outside of the local area. Overall, the results suggest local financial development is an important determinant of the economic success of an area even in an environment where there are no frictions to capital movements.

This research utilizes an institutional perspective to examine the behavior of venture capital professionals in three distinct regions of the world (Asia, U.S., Europe). Based upon a mail survey, we find reasonably consistent views around the world on the relative importance of various venture capitalist roles. However, we find that how those roles are implemented is shaped by cognitive institutional influences in the given region. We find that a model developed in the U.S. to predict the amount of venture capitalist/CEO interaction is not valid in Asia. Further, Asian boards have much greater insider representation than do U.S. or European boards. We attribute these difference to the greater emphasis in Asia on the importance of collective action.

This Paper studies the objective function of state-owned banks. Using information on individual loan contracts, I compare the interest rate charged to two sets of companies with identical characteristics borrowing respectively from state-owned and privately owned banks. State-owned banks charge lower interest rates than do privately owned banks to similar or identical firms, even if the company is able to borrow more from privately owned banks. State-owned banks mostly favour firms located in depressed areas and large firms. The lending behaviour of state-owned banks is affected by the electoral results of the party affiliated with the bank: the stronger the political party in the area where the firm is borrowing, the lower the interest rates charged. This result is robust to including bank and firm fixed effects.

Since Max Weber, there has been an active debate on the impact of religion on people’s economic attitudes. Much of the existing evidence, however, is based on cross-country studies in which this impact is confounded by differences in other institutional factors. We use the WorldValues Surveys to id entify the relationship between intensity of religious beliefs and economic attitudes, controlling for country-fixed effects. We study several economic attitudes towardcooperation, the government, working women, legal rules, thriftiness, andthe market economy. We also distinguish across religious denominations, differentiating on whether a religion is dominant in a country. We find that on average, religious beliefs are associated with ‘‘good’’ economic attitudes, where ‘‘good’’ is defined as conducive to higher per capita income andgrowth. Yet religious people tendto be more racist andless favorable with respect to working women. These effects differ across religious denominations. Overall, we find that Christian religions are more positively associatedwith attitudes conducive to economic growth. r 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. JEL classification: A1; E0; N4; Z1

Does inefficiency of financial markets have real consequences? Or does it only result in transfers of wealth from noise traders to arbitrageurs? We study firm business investment to address this question. In our model, benevolent managers of overvalued companies invest in projects with negative net present value and managers of undervalued companies forego projects with positive net present value. Empirically, we find a positive relation between investment and a number of proxies for mispricing, controlling for investment opportunities and financial slack, suggesting that overpriced (underpriced) firms tend to overinvest (underinvest). Consistent with the predictions of our model, we find that investment is more sensitive to mispricing for firms with higher R&D intensity (suggesting longer periods of information asymmetry) or share turnover (suggesting that the firms' shareholders are short-term investors). We document similar patterns in the cross-section of average returns. Firms with relatively high (low) investment subsequently have relatively low (high) stock returns, after controlling for investment opportunities and other characteristics linked to return predictability. These patterns are stronger for firms with higher R&D intensity or higher share turnover.

To identify the effect of social capital on financial development, we exploit the well-known differences in social capital (Banfield (1958), Putnam (1993)) across different parts of Italy. In areas of the country with high levels of social capital, households invest less in cash and more in stock, are more likely to use checks, have higher access to institutional credit, and make less use of informal credit. The effect of social capital is stronger where legal enforcement is weaker and among less-educated people. These results are not driven by omitted environmental variables, since we show that the behavior of movers is still affected by the level of social capital present in the province where they were born.