I study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on female economists’ research productivity. I collect data from the SSRN web archive on 4,778 distinct pre-prints in- volving 8,651 authors from over 90 countries observed from January to mid-November 2020. By estimating a Difference-in-Differences, my results show that, since the lock- down began, the number of working papers written by a female economist, alone or jointly with other researchers, uploaded on SSRN declined of about 20 percentage points and this negative effect persists up to about 4 months later. Declines in productivity, however, disappear during the school re-opening period suggesting that indeed childcare demand has been an important channel in causing women production drop. Finally, declines in productivity are not associated with increases in pre-prints’ quality.

This paper provides a novel empirical test of human capital theory by studying whether increases in residual working life induce additional training. I exploit a sizable pension reform, affecting all Italian workers, in a Difference-in-Differences setting and find that an increase in the residual working life increases human capital investment. Additionally, I show that the response to the reform was very heterogeneous and depending on gender, age profiles, education, martial status, sector of employment and firm size. However, my estimates suggest to rule out that positive variations in human capital investment were directly sponsored by employers.

Are public investment subsidies effective? I provide novel empirical evidence on the effectiveness of public subsidies for SMEs by investigating the effect of a subsidy program taken place in Campania (South Italy) in 2013. By relying on a Difference-in-Differences approach, my estimates demonstrate that the regional program was effective in increasing private firms' spending in innovative investment. However, I show also large heterogeneity in the firms response. In particular, I find that the positive effect on investment comes from micro- and small-size firms as well as firms operating in high tech sectors and high tech service firms. Nonetheless, I am not able to reject the hypothesis that firms increased spending by about approximately the amount of the subsidy.