Abstract Relying on a unique survey of more than 15,000 respondents conducted from June to August 2020 in Italy, we show that priming religiosity in healthcare workers decreases the level of self-assessed mental distress experienced during the first wave of the COVID-19. Consistent with the idea that religiosity serves as a coping mechanism, this effect is stronger for the more impacted categories (e.g., hospital workers) and for respondents facing more stressful situations, such as being reassigned due to the COVID-19 emergency or working in a COVID-19-related specialty (e.g., emergency care), among others. All things equal, the effect is stronger on nurses, who were the target of a media campaign identifying them as COVID-19 angels, than on physicians. JEL Classification: I10, N34, Z12 Keywords: Healthcare Workers, Mental Wellbeing, COVID-19, Coping Mechanisms, Religiosity

Abstract: Young adults in the United States, and young Black adults especially, experience high poverty rates compared to other demographic groups. Prior research has largely attributed racial disparities in young adult poverty to differential attainment of benchmarks related to education, employment, and family formation. This study, in contrast, investigates how racial differences in exposure to childhood poverty shapes racial differences in young adult poverty. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we find that childhood poverty has large direct and indirect effects on young adult poverty. Indirectly, childhood poverty affects young adult poverty through its negative association with education, employment, and family formation benchmarks. Directly, each additional year of childhood poverty increases the likelihood that a young adult lives in poverty, independent of the benchmarks. Black children experience poverty at three times the rate as White children, face three times the rate of poverty in young adulthood even if they meet all three benchmarks, and experience a persistent negative effect of childhood poverty on young adult poverty. Racial differences in exposure to childhood poverty are as consequential as differential attainment of education, employment, and family formation benchmarks in shaping racial differences in young adult poverty.

Abstract
We examine the e¤ects of the book censorship implemented by the Catholic inquisition on printing outcomes in Renaissance Venice. The Venetian press experienced minimum censorship until 1547, when a sudden change in the balance of European power led to a new relationship between the Republic of Venice and the Papal State. We collect detailed information on indexes of prohibited books and publication activities by the main printers active in Venice during the 1500s. We use these data to construct treatment and comparison groups based on the specialization of each printer in transgressive publications before the inquisition. Di¤erences-in-di¤erences regressions show that censorship had a signi…cant impact on publication levels and industry structure, with the …rms more heavily targeted by the inquisition losing market shares to those less a¤ected by censorship. These e¤ects appear long lasting and associated to changes in survival and entry patterns. We also show that censorship led to a change in the direction of publishing, with printers more a¤ected by the inquisition shifting away from vernacular literature and becoming more reluctant to publish new and contemporary authors.
These …ndings support the idea that censorship may have dynamic e¤ects on the structure, evolution, and creativity of industries that go beyond the removal of certain types of creative work from the market.
Keywords: censorship, creativity, industry structure, Renaissance, Venice, printing press
JEL Codes: O33, N33, L51

Families in the 21st Century - Abstract Both the media and social scientists have for decades now portrayed the family as an endangered species: evermore citizens opt for singlehood or less binding kinds of partnerships, marriages appear evermore unstable, and people appear reluctant to have children—witness historically record low (and persistent) fertility rates across much of Europe. In fact, the ever-less family scenario is very much what the two theoretical perspectives that dominate demographic research would predict. Gary Becker identifies the gains from conjugal specialization as the key advantage of partnering. It follows that the changing economic role of women will undermine this utility. The rival framework, known as the Second Demographic Transition thesis, predicts the very same outcome but emphasizes the role of “postmodern values” which promote individualism and self-realization. But the most up-to-date evidence ends up contradicting the “less family” thesis on almost all points. And in a non-trivial number of countries, Scandinavia par excellence, the family is clearly recovering. The single most revealing fact is that the return to “more family” is led by exactly the same social strata who, initially, spearheaded the “less family” scenario—namely the higher educated. In other words, it is now increasingly the lower social strata that epitomize the “less family” scenario. This leads us to ask: Are some countries now turning their back on “postmodern” values? Or put differently, in 21st century Europe it is countries like Italy and Spain which display family erosion most blatantly. What primarily motivated me to write this book was my conviction that the reigning theories had it all wrong. The key driver behind contemporary family dynamics is neither the end of the housewife, nor postmodern individualism. Instead, the dynamics are driven by the revolution of women’s roles - but the emergence of a stable gender egalitarian equilibrium necessitates adaptation at both the societal and partnership level.

Extant theory suggests that candidates with an unfocused identity suffer from a valuation penalty because evaluators are confused by their profile, and concerned they lack the required skills. We argue, in contrast, that unfocused candidates may be penalized for another reason: they threaten established social boundaries. This happens in contexts where evaluators act as gatekeepers on behalf of a social entity such as a profession. We test how the penalty applied to unfocused candidates varies in an academic accreditation process, a setting where evaluators decide on admitting candidates to an academic discipline and where candidates’ prior performance is observable. We find, using data on the 2012 national scientific qualification in Italian academia, that the valuation penalty applied to unfocused (multi-disciplinary) candidates was most pronounced for the most high-performing candidates. High-performing yet ill-fitting candidates threaten the distinctiveness and knowledge domain of the discipline and are hence penalized by evaluators. High-performing multidisciplinary candidates suffered the greatest penalty in small and distinctive academic disciplines and when accreditors were highly typical members of their discipline. Our theory and findings suggest that the categorical imperative may not only be driven by cognitive or capability considerations, as typically argued in the literature, but also by attempts to maintain social boundaries.
Keywords: Social valuation; accreditation; social boundaries; boundary work; multidisciplinary research; science.

Migrants are often disadvantaged in the housing market and live segregated from the majority population in poorer neighborhoods. This has long been seen as a serious obstacle to their social integration. However, little is known about the underlying mechanisms. We conducted multifactorial field experiments to better understand possible underlying mechanisms: Does ethnic discrimination reinforce segregation, and if so, for what reasons? And does immigration, which might exacerbate interethnic conflicts but also interethnic contact, affect the level of discrimination? We conducted a large‐scale field experiment (e‐mail correspondence test) on ethnic discrimination in the German rental housing market. In 2015, we drew a sample of ~ 5,000 housing offers from an internet platform, and applied to these offers with e‐mails that signaled a Turkish versus a German background. What is unique about our study is that we conducted our experiment all over Germany and that we used a multi‐factorial experimental design: We varied not only ethnicity but also (the amount of information on) other socio‐economic characteristics of our applicants. We found that Turkish applicants with low status are particularly discriminated against, but less so in immigrant neighborhoods. These findings suggest that discrimination increases residential segregation: not only ethnic segregation, but also social segregation. We also used the massive influx of refugees in Europe in 2015 to see whether there is a causal effect of immigration on discrimination. We carried out the first wave of our field experiments shortly before the European ‘refugee crisis’ and repeated a second wave of experiments at the peak of the crisis. Combining our longitudinal experimental setting with the quasi-random spatial distribution of refugees to counties in Germany allows us to identify the effect of immigration on discrimination. Our results suggest that correlations between immigration and discrimination found in previous cross-sectional studies should be interpreted with caution. Our findings also highlight the importance of longitudinal field experiments.