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Digital skills are increasingly important for labour market outcomes and social participation. Do they also matter for academic performance? This paper investigates the effects of digital literacy on educational outcomes by merging data from the Italian National Assessment in secondary schools with an original data-set on performance tests of Internet skills for tenth-grade students. Our identification strategy relies on a rich set of individual, family, school and classroom control variables that are not commonly available in previous studies. The findings indicate that, overall, Internet skills have a positive impact on academic achievement. This effect is stronger for students with low academic performance or low family background. It is also stronger for students in technical or vocational schools.

Within contests, adjudication errors imply at the same time the exclusion of a meritorious candidate and the inclusion of a non-meritorious one. We study theoretically how adjudication errors affect bids in all-pay auctions, by disentangling the respective effects of exclusion and inclusion errors, and showing how they interact with the framing of incentives (prize or penalty) under different assumptions on preferences. We test our theoretical predictions with an experiment where we manipulate the presence of exclusion errors, inclusion errors, and the framing of incentives. The experimental evidence indicates that errors of either exclusion or inclusion significantly decrease bids in all-pay auctions relative to a setting without errors, interacting negatively, with no significant difference in the size of their effects. Bid levels are significantly higher in a penalty framing relative to a prize framing, both in the absence of errors and in the presence of adjudication errors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the cross-country distribution of the relationship between economic conditions and well-being. Using a large sample of individuals from 94 countries worldwide, we find that the effect of income on well-being is larger in countries with lower GDP per capita, while the negative effect of being unemployed is stronger in countries with higher unemployment rate or higher GDP per capita. Interestingly, the effect of being unemployed displays positive spatial dependence across countries that is not accounted for by aggregate socio-economic conditions. Overall, the results indicate that geography, culture and institutions must be explicitly taken into account in order to understand the relationship between economic conditions and well-being.

The author presents new evidence on the effects of attendance on academic performance. He used a large panel data set for introductory microeconomics students to explicitly take into account the effect of unobservable factors correlated with attendance, such as ability, effort, and motivation. He found that neither proxy variables nor instrumental variables provide a solution to the omitted variable bias. Panel estimators indicate that attendance has a smaller but significant impact on performance. Lecture and classes have a similar effect on performance individually, although their impact cannot be identified separately. Overall, the results indicate that, after controlling for unobservable student characteristics, attendance has a statistically significant and quantitatively relevant effect on student learning. (Contains 5 tables and 22 notes.)

This paper investigates the role of television in producing higher material aspirations, by enhancing both adaptation and positional effects. Using a large sample of individuals from the World Values Survey, we find that the effect of income on both life and financial satisfaction is significantly smaller for heavy television viewers than for occasional viewers. This finding is robust to a number of specification checks and alternative interpretations. The results suggest an additional explanation for the income-happiness paradox: the pervasive and increasing role of television viewing in contemporary society, by raising material aspirations, contributes to offset the effect of higher income on individual happiness.