ABSTRACT. The aim of this paper is to investigate voters’ behaviour when they have rational incentives to vote strategically instead of sincerely. We use a fiscal federalism set up with two layers of government: centralized and decentralized. Under decentralization, decision on taxing and spending is made by the local median voter. Instead, under centralized decision making, we consider two different set ups, one where voters have no incentive to vote strategically and the second one where voters have such an incentive. We investigate in the laboratory how voters react when they understand they might be better (worst) off by strategic (sincere) voting. In our experiment we study the impact of strategic delegation on the degree of redistribution and, therefore, of progressivity.

ABSTRACT. By employing a large sample of both laboratory and field data, this paper investigates whether attitudes towards risk significantly vary between physicians and participants taking medical decisions in the experimental sessions. Also, we look for differences in risk attitude between laboratory and artefactual field experiments. Results show significant variation in risk attitude, regardless of the estimation technique employed such as linear regression, interval regression and maximum likelihood estimation, suggesting constant relative risk aversion (CRRA) as a supported representation of preferences. In particular, data consistently show that physicians are more risk-seeking in the monetary domain than other subject groups.

ABSTRACT. We conduct an online redistribution experiment with 773 French local politicians to study why politicians deviate from the median voter's preferences. Participants had to choose a tax rate to be applied to groups of French citizens. One part of the total tax proceeds is lost, while the remainder is equally redistributed among the group (equality-efficiency trade-off). The choice environment differs with respect to the degree of information about the median voter and the degree of political competition. We find that politicians do take voters' preferences into consideration, but there is also a strong impact of their own ideology while there is no effect of political competition. We also recruit a representative sample from the French population and find little behavioral differences with our politician sample.

ABSTRACT. Donors often use the services of an intermediary to prevent their donations from being too thinly distributed over multiple public projects. We explore whether donors' willingness to coordinate their funds via an intermediary depends on the extent of the intermediary's discretion over their contributions, as well as the organizational overhead costs faced by the intermediary. We investigate this using a laboratory experiment in which donors face multiple identical threshold public goods and the opportunity to coordinate their contributions via another donor assigned to the role of intermediary. As predicted by standard theory, we find that donors make use of the intermediary only when they know she is heavily restricted in terms of the proportion of their contributions she can expropriate for herself. However, contrary to theoretical predictions, the positive effect of these restrictions is undone once the intermediary incurs a sunk overhead cost. Our analysis suggests that the ex-ante inequality created as a result of this sunk cost reduces the trustworthiness of the intermediary in the donors' eyes, which in turn reduces their willingness to use the intermediary to coordinate their contributions effectively.

ABSTRACT. The EU Cohesion Policy, which delivers economic, territorial, and social cohesion in the recipient territories, is expected to affect the political preferences of Europeans increasing public appreciation towards the EU. Until now, the extent to which the EU Cohesion Policy influences the political preferences has been studied only at the national level neglecting the territorial nature of the policy and the crucial role of local policymakers in its activation. By leveraging the place-based nature of the policy, this paper investigates whether local incumbent politicians - Italian mayors – can buy political support through EU Cohesion Policy. By exploiting high-quality administrative Italian data on Cohesion Policy beneficiaries, we analyse the relationship between several types of European funds - according to their visibility and capacity of capturing the mayors’ ability to attract and implement European projects - and the probability of local re-election for mayors. Relying on a rich linear probability model, we find evidence of a systematic relationship between Cohesion Policy and local electoral outcomes. In detail, our results show that EU funds have a reciprocity and support-buying effect, and that the visibility and the magnitude of the EU Cohesion Policy play a crucial role in shaping local voting behaviours. Next, the paper tries to disentangle the main channels driving these results. We consider the different thematic objectives of EU projects, the actual improvements in citizens’ living conditions, and political accountability as possible mediators of the systematic relationship between EU funds and local electoral outcomes. These results have crucial implications. The political effect of place-based EU redistributive policies is eminently dependent on the design, the visibility, and the effectiveness of local development projects.

ABSTRACT. Cross-country income inequality has declined in the last decades, but this trend has been paralleled by an increase in within-countries inequality. At the same time, many governments have implemented fiscal decentralization policies, devolving increasing decision making powers on fiscal matters to sub-national levels of government. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence on the relationship between fiscal decentralization and intraregional income redistribution, based on regional level data on inequality and government revenues for 187 regions of 15 OECD countries. Our results show that within region income redistribution is negatively associated with fiscal decentralization, especially when it takes the form of revenue decentralization.

ABSTRACT. Asymmetric fiscal needs of municipalities bias yardstick competition between pure rent-seeking local administrators. There are cases where differences in institutional quality may mitigate this bias, in other cases the bias is exacerbated. While incumbents gain control over the political yardstick competition by cooperating in inter-municipal consortia, they increase the extracted rent lowering the quality of public services. The yardstick competition bias leads to asymmetric rent share that makes inter-municipal cooperation possible only if the institutional quality of the municipal consortia is low enough, depending on the minimum service quality set by the central government, and the average institutional quality of the single municipalities. Matching grants from upper levels of government or economies of scale may be incentives to cooperation since they reduce the cost of local public goods supply increasing the amount of total cooperative rent. However, they fail to increase the quality of local public services.

ABSTRACT. Municipalities’ territorial scale can be an important factor in determining the cost of the provision of local public services. In the last two decades national governments tried to induce, through specific laws or financial incentives, amalgamation or cooperation of small municipalities in the provision of local public services. Evidence on the impact of amalgamation and cooperation is mixed. Most of research concentrate on the effect on cost per capita. In our work we exploit a panel dataset for the years 2010, 2013, 2015 and 2016 for all Italian municipalities with details on output relative to nine services. The novelty of our approach is to use a panel disaggregated not only by municipalities but, also by services. This last distinction is extremely important in evaluating the impact of intermunicipal cooperation, which, differently from amalgamation, cover only some specific expenditure functions. With our dataset we can sharply associate the impact of intermunicipal cooperation to the specific expenditure and relative output on which municipalities agree to collaborate. We find that intermunicipal cooperation decreases the ratio between output and expenditure by 14%. This result is stronger the smaller the municipality is, confirming the role of intermunicipal cooperation in exploiting scale economies. When we look at specific outputs, we do not find any impact of intermunicipal cooperation. Consequently, the impact of intermunicipal cooperation on expenditure per output provided is negative. We conclude that intermunicipal cooperation improves efficiency in the provision of local services.

ABSTRACT. I exploit the staggered introduction of a reform that introduced direct election of mayor in Italy to estimate the causal impact of the election of political leaders on the probability that female candidates are selected. I find that the direct elections increase substantially the probability that a female candidate is elected as the new mayor. The results are stronger in cities with an high pre-reform share of female politicians and driven by newly elected female officials replacing undereducated incumbents. The results of this paper inform that voters are more open to elect female leaders than party representatives.

ABSTRACT. Despite the efforts to reduce gender gaps, women are still under-represented among politicians. In this paper I use a novel dataset of Canton Ticino (Switzerland) to shed light on the drivers of under-representation in open list municipal elections with panachage. First, I document a more pronounced and robust gender gap in the probability of being elected in executive local bodies than in legislative ones. Second, I show that individual preference votes are an important driver of gender differences in candidates success: female candidates collect less individual votes than male candidates, after controlling for party ideology, pre-election ranking in the list, and incumbent status. Third, I draw a valuable insight by estimating gender differences in candidates success separately for different types of preference votes. In this context of Panachage, women perform worst than men in the share of preference votes cast by voters with a clear political identity, supporting opponent parties. Conversely, no robust gender gap emerges in the share of votes cast by non-partisan voters, nor in the share of votes cast within the party. This result reveals important gender differences in candidates ability to capture voters, on the basis of their ideology, and brings salient policy implications concerning the impact of electoral systems on female representation.

ABSTRACT. In this paper we study, theoretically and empirically, how the belief that the gender of politicians affects their competence on a range of issues may influence electoral outcomes depending on the salience of these issues. We propose a model of issue-specific gender bias in elections which can be describe both the presence of a real comparative advantage (“kernel-of-truth” case, or stereotype) and the case of pure prejudice. We show that that the bias influences electoral results but it can be partially reversed by successful information transmission during the electoral campaign. We then investigate the relation between issue salience and women performance empirically, using US data on House and Senate elections. Estimates of issue-salience are obtained using Google Trends data. Results show a positive correlation between the salience of feminine issues and women’s electoral outcomes.

ABSTRACT. The European strategy for early diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer involves a strong public intervention, i.e. the implementation of Organized Screening Programs (OSPs). This paper uses a unique dataset built by linking data on regional level OSPs, with individual survey data from the European Health Interview Survey (EHIS), and population-based cancer registries on diagnosis and death to evaluate the effects of OSPs on mammography uptake, targeting, breast cancer diagnosis and mortality. We employ multiple complementary quasi-experimental approaches that exploit regional heterogeneity in the availability of OSPs, in the age eligibility criteria, and the timing of OSPs introduction. We find that OSPs increase mammography uptake by more than 30% and efficiently target women at higher risk of developing cancer or less incline to do prevention. While OSPs increase the number of breast cancer diagnoses by 20%, reduction in mortality is about 9% and materialize ten years after implementation of OSPs.

ABSTRACT. The healthcare sector is often considered one of the most prone to corruption and transparency policies have been proposed in several countries to fight bribery and corruption. Indeed, the transparency of public bodies potentially play a relevant role in preventing misbehaviours and favouring accountability. The paper contributes to the broader understanding of the transparency role in the healthcare sector using Italy as a case study. For this purpose, we first build a composite indicator to assess the differences in transparency and integrity between Italian Local Health Authorities (LHAs). Then, we use multivariate regression to explore the relationship between the performance for different expenditure functions at LHAs level and transparency index. Our results show a wide difference in transparency and integrity among LHAs that does not always follow the classic north-south divide in the country. In addition, we find results consistent with the idea that transparency is generally associated with better performance of the LHAs in containment total health expenditure while imposing larger administrative burdens. Overall, reforms promoting transparency impose administrative costs which the policymaker should bear in mind to develop less burdensome transparency measures, as they might not be a “free lunch”.

ABSTRACT. In the recent literature on symptoms of depression in the elderly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the neglected topics is the impact of disrupting parent–adult child contacts on their psychological and emotional well-being. Using data from the 8th wave of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and the SHARE Corona Survey, this study aims to fill this gap, providing additional insights into the psychological status of, and strain on, older people during the COVID-19 outbreak and contributing to the body of research on the negative association between social isolation and the psychological well-being of the elderly. We model the relationship between the disruption of parent–adult child contacts and the mental health of the elderly during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic using a recursive simultaneous equation model for binary variables. Our findings show that the likelihood of disruption of parent–adult child contacts was higher with adult children who do not live with or close to their parents (i.e., in the same household or in the same building) for whom contact disruption increases about 15%: older adults remained isolated in their homes with limited contacts with others, including those with non-cohabiting adult children, considered a critical factor in contributing to the spread of COVID-19. The duration of restrictions to movement and lockdowns also has a positive and significant effect on parent-child contact disruption: an additional week of lockdown significantly increases the probability of parent-child contact disruption, by about 1.5%. The interventions deemed essential to reduce the spread of the pandemic, such as the “stay-at-home” order, necessarily disrupted personal parent–child contacts and the social processes that facilitate psychological well-being, increasing the probability of suffering from a deepening depressed mood by about 17% for elderly parents.

ABSTRACT. Our paper aims to contribute to the existing literature on educational mismatch by investigating the influence of vertical educational mismatch - overeducation and undereducation - on selected EQ-5D metrics, namely pain and anxiety/depression. We conduct a gender-specific analysis and estimate ordered probit models for our categorical dependent variables by using a sample of currently working employees from the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (2005). Since our health outcomes are self-reported, we challenge the validity of the results obtained by using the ordered probit model and enrich the analysis by correcting our estimates for the presence of reporting heterogeneity bias. To do that, we merge the RLMS-HSE (2005) with externally collected anchoring vignettes for Russia from the World Health Survey (2003) and estimate the hierarchical ordered probit (HOPIT) models. The HOPIT estimates show that in several cases, educational mismatch affects the reporting style of respondents. Our findings provide evidence that, after adjusting for reporting heterogeneity, undereducation has a negative influence on the physical component of health (proxied by pain) for women, while overeducation affects the psychological component of health (proxied by anxiety/depression) in both gender groups. Overeducated women appear to have better psychological health, while overeducated men have worse psychological health than their matched counterparts.

ABSTRACT. The CITSIM-DF model is a policy tool for guiding policy actions and assessing the heterogeneous impact of fiscal policies in terms of financial and distributional effects on average effective tax rates. The model allows the simulation of different policy scenarios considering the direct effects of changes in tax regulations. The main regulatory measures taken into consideration are those included in the ”Industry 4.0” plan, as well as the measures related to the allowance for corporate equity (ACE), the deductibility of interest expenses, loss carryforward and the deductibility of Municipal own tax (Imu) and Indivisible Services Fee (Tasi). CITSIM-DF uses a database that integrates data from tax returns and financial statements for corporations for the period 2008-2017, allowing for dynamic analyses over time. The major strength of the model is the ability to project tax and balance sheet variables forward, and to make firm level estimates of the investments and the historical cost broken down between buildings and machinery. Thanks to the detailed reconstruction of the two investment categories, it is possible to accurately estimate the effects of measures involving a specific type of investment.

ABSTRACT. Negli ultimi anni in Italia, come in molti altri paesi europei, sono stati rafforzati gli incentivi di natura fiscale agli investimenti in Ricerca e Sviluppo (R&S) delle imprese private. Le agevolazioni hanno riguardato sia la spesa sostenuta sia il suo rendimento in termini di risultati effettivamente ottenuti (brevetti e altre attività giuridicamente tutelate). In particolare, dal 2015 al 2020 è stato previsto un credito di imposta commisurato alla spesa in R&S effettuata dalle imprese e una deduzione dal reddito imponibile di una percentuale del reddito derivante dall’utilizzazione di alcune tipologie di beni immateriali giuridicamente tutelabili e delle plusvalenze (se reinvestite al 90 per cento) derivanti dalla loro cessione (il cosiddetto patent box). Questi regimi sono stati più volte modificati con riferimento alla loro estensione (tipologia di spese e di beni ammissibili), alla modalità di calcolo (spesa incrementale o complessiva) e alla intensità dell’agevolazione (percentuale della spesa detraibile o del reddito deducibile). Il credito di imposta costituisce formalmente un’agevolazione temporanea che è stata tuttavia costantemente riproposta e prorogata negli ultimi anni e, da ultimo, fino al 2031 con la legge di bilancio per il 2022. Dal 2021, invece, è stato abolito il regime del patent box ed è stato sostituito con una nuova deduzione dalla base imponibile delle imposte sui redditi e dell’Irap pari al 110 per cento della spesa in R&S sostenuta in relazione ai beni immateriali giuridicamente tutelabili. Questa analisi mette in luce alcuni risultati relativi all’introduzione di questi incentivi nel sistema. In particolare, si evidenzia che nel biennio 2017-18 la convenienza a investire è risultata piuttosto elevata grazie al potenziamento del credito di imposta, mentre nel 2020 l’impatto delle agevolazioni ha raggiunto il suo valore minimo. D’altra parte, nel biennio 2021-22 la nuova deduzione del 110 per cento in sostituzione del patent box ha reso il complesso delle misure adottate più generoso. Negli anni seguenti la convenienza sembrerebbe destinata a ridursi a causa del progressivo depotenziamento del credito di imposta. Dalla analisi dei dati disponibili sulle agevolazioni effettivamente utilizzate dalle società di capitali emerge tuttavia che, in termini di aliquota media effettiva (e quindi di risparmio di imposta), il patent box risulta più vantaggioso, rispetto alla deduzione, per i beni immateriali che garantiscono una redditività maggiore. Questo aspetto potrebbe ridurre la competitività del nostro sistema in termini di localizzazione a livello internazionale di queste attività; d’altra parte, la deduzione potrà ampliare la platea dei beneficiari grazie a una sostanziale semplificazione delle modalità di accesso alla misura.

ABSTRACT. Italy introduced the Allowance for Corporate Equity (ACE) scheme in 2011 with the Decree law n. 201/2011. The ACE is aimed at encouraging dimensional growth and addressing debt/equity bias; it belongs to a family of fiscal measures whose concern is about removing incentives toward indebtedness due to interest deducibility and pursuing greater recourse to equity capital. In this paper, we assess the effect of the ACE incentive on firms’ willingness to invest and on their performances. We can rely on a proprietary dataset provided by the Department of Finance of the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance. Exactly matching micro-data from corporate tax returns and financial accounts, we are able to identify the beneficiaries of the allowance accounting for other tax incentives. Although standard quasi-experimental techniques were proven to be efficient in estimating the policies impact, in the last decade machine learning tools are gaining momentum for a wide range of economic applications. As supervised machine learning algorithms are powerful tools for predictions, they are especially suitable to couple with econometric techniques concerned with the estimation of first-stage regressions describing the behavior of a covariate, predicting the probability of receiving a treatment in a matching process or predicting the policy outcome in an impact evaluation. Our empirical strategy consists of applying machine learning for causal inference as proposed by Athey and Imbens (2017) and Wager and Athey (2018). In order to assess the heterogeneous treatment effect with machine learning, using the R package “grf” we estimate a Causal Forest (Athey and Imbens, 2016, Wager and Athey, 2018 and Athey, Tibshirani and Wager, 2019) as an adaption of the traditional model originally proposed by Leo Breiman. Wager and Athey (2018) provided conditions under which the treatment effect estimated by honest trees is consistent and asymptotically Gaussian, making it suitable for causal inference. To the best of our knowledge, this paper represents the first attempt to apply Causal Forests to assess the treatment effect of a tax policy. Nonetheless, in a forthcoming extension of our research, our results will be compared with the ones obtained estimating a traditional Diff-in-Diff and identifying the control group according to PSM. Due to the long time-span of our tax data, the present analysis can shed light on the overall effectiveness of the ACE scheme since its introduction in Italy.

ABSTRACT. La valutazione degli incentivi agli investimenti è fondamentale sia sotto il profilo della politica industriale, per scegliere i meccanismi che più incidono sulle decisioni delle imprese, ma anche sotto il profilo della finanza pubblica perché è di notevole importanza comprendere se le risorse stanziate inizialmente al momento del varo della policy corrispondano alle risorse effettivamente impiegate e siano state efficaci. Questo lavoro procede alla valutazione ex post della politica del credito di imposta sugli investimenti riservato alle imprese operanti nelle regioni meridionali a partire dal 2016 sulla base delle informazioni estraibili dal modello Medita che consentono di verificare , con un modello difference in difference una parziale efficacia dello strumento utilizzato.

ABSTRACT. We consider a greening monetary policy framework implemented by the central bank. Under this framework, firms and banks (or financial intermediaries) must decide whether or not to apply a green (favoring the environment) or brown (conventional) policy. We develop an evolutionary game to show the conditions such that the economy dynamically evolves towards one state or another (green \textit{vs} brown). We analyze the main parameters to converge in an evolutionarily stable path towards greening or not, namely the role of: the interest rates, bank loans, firms revenues, and the cost productive transition to green. We show that the green state is asymptotically stable if the green firms' revenues minus their bank loans and their transition costs are greater than the brown firms' revenues and their pollution costs, together with special green interest rates such that the default risk is lower for green firms compared to brown ones. Otherwise, the economy converges to the conventional situation of not green or browning economy. Simulation analysis corroborate our results.

ABSTRACT. We investigate the pro-environmental behavior of green firms in a context where consumers value the eco-quality features embodied in the goods consumed. We present a two-sector monopolistic competition model with green and brown goods displaying both horizontal and vertical differentiation. By means of analytical and quantitative techniques, we derive the optimal eco-quality level selected by green firms and the industry structure both in the short- and long-run equilibrium. We then study the effectiveness of three policy tools (green incentives, MQS and green campaigns) with respect to the regulator’s objective of increasing the overall level of the greenness, which we measure through a specific indicator. We find that each policy alone is apt to stimulate an increase in the greenness intensity compared to the unregulated equilibrium and that the joint use of the three policies helps to attain a greater level of greenness than that resulting from just one of them. The different transmission mechanisms, however, make the policy instruments not neutral with respect to the equilibrium structure of the industry that emerges after the regulatory interventions.

ABSTRACT. We test the political budget cycle hypothesis using revenue data from Italian municipal administrations. Exploiting the staggered schedule of local elections and implementing a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that mayors behave opportunistically. In pre-election years, they decrease total accrued revenues from waste disposal tariffs and property taxes, which are primary sources of revenue in a municipal financial statement. Non-term-limited mayors who choose to run for re-election behave opportunistically, whereas mayors who face a binding term limit do not manipulate revenues for electoral purposes. These findings are robust to a set of different specifications and controls. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that our results are mainly driven by smaller municipalities, municipalities that are endowed with lower levels of social capital or are located in the South of the country.

ABSTRACT. The paper investigates the link between pro-environment parties and environmental policy outcomes at the municipal level in Italy for the years 2011‐2018. We investigate whether mayors supported by proenvironment parties or directly belonging to one of them increase spending on separate waste collection and other environmental outcomes, compared to non-pro-environment mayors. Exploiting close elections in a regression discontinuity framework we detect a sizable and statistically significant increase in the share of recycling rates in municipalities run by a pro-environmental coalition. Our results suggest that proenvironmental mayors did not increase the budget for environment, but they still managed to increase the recycling rate by over 9 percentage points.

ABSTRACT. This study exploits a 2014 reform that granted mayors of Italian towns with less than 3,000 residents the possibility to run for a third term to analyze the effects of extending term limits on public finance outcomes. Employing a difference-in-discontinuity design, we find that mayors who are in their second term at the time of the reform, and would otherwise be forced to step down, tend to increase revenue through debt, transfer resources towards salient spending items such as waste management and public transport, and become less efficient in collecting taxes. First-term mayors, who now face two instead of one potential re-election, increase revenue through the sale of assets and increase investments particularly on public housing. While we interpret the results on second-term mayors as reflecting an act of pandering to voters to be re-elected, we argue two mechanisms are at play for first-term mayors. First, these mayors could be preparing the ground for their potential second re-election by investing in items that only pay off electorally at a later stage. Second, the substantially longer horizon they now face increases the incentives to capture politicians by exchanging reelection promises against public spending in specific items. This second mechanism is substantiated by the fact our main results are driven by municipalities in the south of Italy. (JEL D73, H57, K12, D72)

ABSTRACT. Why do anti-immigrant political parties have more success in areas that host fewer immigrants? We use data from a sample of Italian municipalities to show that the relationship between the vote shares of anti-immigrant parties and the share of immi- grants follows a U-shaped curve, which exhibits a tipping-like behavior around a share of immigrants equal to 3.35 %. We estimate that the vote share of the main Italian anti-immigrant party (Lega Nord) is approximately 6 % points higher for municipali- ties below the threshold. We show that the competition in the labor market between natives and immigrants is the more plausible explanation for the electoral success of anti-immigrant parties in areas with low immigrant shares. Finally, we rationalize our ndings with a simple theoretical model and show that alternative stories nd less support in the data.

ABSTRACT. Digital COVID-19 certificates have been under assessment in many countries and mandated in others as a pre-requisite to perform some daily activities. Our paper focuses on two European countries which adopted very different measures in this respect: Italy and Spain. In Spain, initially only Galicia and Canary Islands required the proof of vaccination, testing or recovery to visit indoor public spaces. However, a few months after, some Spanish Superior Courts of Justice abrogated the mandatory use. However, following the worsening of the burden of COVID-19, 11 Spanish regions received court approval to make the certificate a condition of entry in specific spaces. In Italy, the institutional scenario was radically different. Since the introduction in June 2021, the Italian prime minister announced at various dates the mandatory use of COVID-19 certificates arriving to introduce mandatory vaccination for individuals aged 50 at the end of 2021. In this work we test the effect of the digital COVID-19 certificate on vaccination rates using a sharp regression kink design estimator and a Difference-in-Differences strategy. Our results reveal that the digital COVID-19 certificate increased vaccinations in Italy in a range that spans from 2.01 to 6.93 percent. The two announcements that mostly increased vaccinations are the first one, i.e., the first introduction of a COVID-19 digital certificate and the introduction of mandatory vaccinations for individuals over 50. For Spain, the situation is different since only the last announcement seems to have been effective in affecting vaccinations.

ABSTRACT. In an effort to understand the determinants of the choice to vaccinate against COVID-19 this paper presents the results of a stated preference survey administered to an Italian representative sample between February 1st and February 8th, 2022 for a total of 1,327 valid interviews. Scenarios to vaccinate against a hypothetical SARS-Cov-2 and against the seasonal flu are provided and results compared. Most respondents choose to vaccinate in all scenarios, (“vaccine enthusiasts”), circa 30% make variable decisions and a minor share never choose to vaccinate (“vaccine resistants”). The results of a logit model show that respondents who see vaccination as a civic duty, are in favor of mandatory vaccination, think that COVID-19 is a serious disease, have moderate political views, are not employed as blue collars or housewives, and declare to have at least some trust in the government are more likely to be COVID-19 vaccine enthusiasts. The results of a multinomial logit model on the respondents who made variable decisions in the COVID-19-related scenarios show that the likelihood to vaccinate increases if the spread of the disease is high, if vaccination is mandatory to go to work, if the vaccine is mRNA based, if vaccination is mandatory to access to recreational activities, to take long means of transportation, and if a negative swab test is not sufficient to be exempted from vaccination. Outcomes also indicate which type of vaccine characteristics and restrictive measures are most effective to foster vaccination uptake especially for additional booster doses currently under discussion.

ABSTRACT. The COVID-19 green certificates were introduced in many countries in 2021 to encourage vaccine uptake in order to limit severe symptoms and deaths from COVID-19. This study uses a single-group interrupted time series approach to examine the effect of the green certificate announcement on the first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine in 20 Italian regions during the summer of 2021. The estimation results show that the announcement caused a significant immediate increase in the first doses in most of the Italian regions. These results remain robust to a structural breaks analysis for the regions of Friuli-Venezia Giulia and Sicily, which had a share of unvaccinated people below the national average. For these regions, the announcement of the certificate mandate incentivized hesitant individuals to get vaccinated immediately after it. There were regions, like Lazio, Puglia and Sardinia, which were unaffected by the announcement, most likely because they already had high rates of first-dose COVID-19 vaccination.

ABSTRACT. The distribution of estates has commonly served for the estimation of the distribution of wealth among the living via the estate multiplier method. Applying detailed multipliers can increase or decrease top wealth shares relative to estate shares. This depends on the evolution of mortality rates by age, gender, income and wealth. In this paper, we make use of a simplified multiplier method - using only average mortality rates and aggregate tabulations by estate size - to produce novel long-run historical series of the distribution of wealth for several developed and developing countries, where data have not been exploited yet. We make use of basic statistical information from the administration of inheritance taxes to make well-grounded inferences about the concentration of wealth in those country-years where there is no information to apply the detailed mortality multiplier method. This allows us to estimate new series of the wealth distribution for a number of countries.

ABSTRACT. Previously suggested Pareto methods have relied on ad-hoc assumptions or visual inspection for parameter determination. We provide a novel approach to estimate all parameters of the Pareto and Generalized Pareto distribution to account for differ- ential non-response and under-reporting in surveys. This generalized and rule-based regression approach is scalable, flexible in the face of heterogeneities in data quality and wealth accumulation regimes, and it is transparent. Existing reweighting and replace- ment methods widely used to account for the missing rich turn out as a special case of this generalized approach. We apply this regression approach to wealth inequality in fourteen Eurozone countries. To capture the top tail of the wealth distribution, we sup- plement the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) with country-specific rich lists from the European Rich List Database (ERLDB) compiled for this purpose. We find that wealth inequality in raw survey data is substantially underestimated in all countries. In the most extreme case, the share of wealth held by the top 1% doubles after accounting for differential biases of survey data. The magnitude of the revision of aggregate wealth and wealth inequality however varies substantially across countries, with the sampling strategy being the most important determinant. This underscores the importance of the rules-based estimated method developed in this paper, especially in comparative settings.

ABSTRACT. The Treasury Dynamic Microsimulation Model (T-DYMM) is a dynamic microsimulation model (DMM) owned by the Department of the Treasury of the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance. One of the very few DMMs presently operating in Italy, it has been developed through three research projects, spanning from 2009 to 2021. The present article is intended to provide a general and comprehensive description of T-DYMM. The model, based on the AD-SILC dataset that matches administrative and survey data, delivers long-term projections and is organised in five modules: demographic, labour market, pension, wealth and tax-benefit (the last two contain the most relevant novelties of the present version of T-DYMM). The broad aim of the model is to provide long-term analyses of the Italian social security system, with a focus on pension and social protection adequacy and their distributional characterization.

ABSTRACT. Recent years have been characterized by policies aimed at reducing the management costs of public spending through centralized management of public procurement (PP). Empirical studies have focused on the effects of such centralizations at regional, national and European level. However, there is still a lack of studies on the centralization of public procurement management at the local level. In particular, this study intends to fill this gap in the literature by addressing the issue of centralization through municipal merger. We use a sample of 35,953 Italian public works contracts awarded, both by municipalities and by municipal mergers, from 2012 to 2021. We estimate a fixed effect regression model which infers whether contracts awarded by a municipal union are characterized by a better performance in terms of winning rebate, delivery delays and execution cost overruns. Our results show that a public tender awarded by a merged municipality is characterized by quite shorter delays, whereas we do not observe any lower or higher rebates, nor lower or higher final execution extra costs. This suggests that amalgamated municipalities tend to be more efficient than single municipalities with respect to the completion time of the works covered by the public contract, i.e. at the execution, rather than the winning stage of the tender.

ABSTRACT. Waste management is one of the main competences of local governments. Municipal waste is about 10% of the total waste generated within the EU. Such quote is far from being insignificant, both in terms of environmental consequences and in terms of tidiness of the city, thus the management of urban waste takes a very important place in urban policies agenda. In our paper we present a theoretical model that considers waste quantity as related to both consumption and production. Since the local government has a target on the share of recycled waste, it has to design a tax or tariff system for waste in order to incentive the effort of citizens, to keep the quote of waste recycled by firm within the municipal waste management and to avoid that firms could use urban waste collection for special waste

ABSTRACT. This paper proposes a novel methodology to identify homogeneous territorial areas in functional terms combining a quantile regression framework with a spatial regime approach. In fact, the average and efficient economic agents behaviours are often characterised by persistence and spatial heterogeneity that must be simultaneously identified within a single and coherent framework. We provide first simulations aimed at verifying the properties of the proposed algorithm. Then, an application to the Italian municipalities is introduced to assess jointly the space and minimum cost functions that serve to correctly define benchmarks for efficient allocation purposes, public spending improvements, and effective equalisation schemes.

ABSTRACT. The effectiveness of fiscal austerity depends the debt to GDP ratio and the response of nominal GDP to budget deficit, nevertheless the European fiscal rules neglect the role of multipliers. This paper points out that public expenditure can drive the nominal fiscal multipliers toward values which make austerity either self-defeating or not, regardless to the value of real multipliers. Some simulations show that most European governments have not exploited the opportunity to reduce the impact on GDP of fiscal consolidation programmes, and this probably slowed down the reduction of the debt to GDP ratio.

ABSTRACT. We describe a new Euro-insurance bond that implies sovereign debt mutualization in the Eurozone without any significant short-term redistribution across countries or perverse incentives to fiscal profligacy. Relying on a GVAR model including the Eurozone countries, the U.S., Japan and China, we analyze the future evolution of public debt (and other key macroeconomic variables) over time by comparing the predicted forecast in the baseline scenario and in a counterfactual scenario with the Euro-insurance bond. We find no significant differences in the future path of interest expenditures- and public debt-over-GDP ratios in the two scenarios, but a consistent reduction in the uncertainty of the estimates in the counterfactual scenario. The reduced uncertainty of forecasts of public debt and other macroeconomic variables highlights the capacity of the Euro-insurance bond to immunize the Eurozone from classical macroeconomic instability shocks that derive by the very existence of high sovereign debts and the related significant rollover risk in a framework of decentralized fiscal policies. Moreover, the proposed scheme would imply a new source of EU revenues that derives by the collection of fiscal (in)discipline premia from individual members of the Eurozone.

ABSTRACT. When using discretionary fiscal policies in the countries belonging to the European Union any change affecting the current fiscal stance must run into the boundary designed by fiscal rules. This would imply that discretionary fiscal policies - being mainly driven by the need to comply with fiscal rules - might be scarcely affected by politics and the political characteristics of a country. We empirically test this hypothesis on a sample of 19 countries belonging to the Euro area observed over the years 1995-2019 with annual data. Using different econometric techniques and alternative specifications, we find a strong and robust pro-cyclicality of the cyclically adjusted budget balance in our sample. More importantly, the pro-cyclicality of the fiscal policy is not significantly affected neither by the behaviour of macroeconomic fundamentals nor by institutional and political variables. From a policy viewpoint, it seems that the mechanisms introduced to control public finance in the Euro area can overcome all possible political influences on the size and the sign of implementable fiscal policies. This would suggest that politics does not matter for the public budget, at least not so much as the rules.

ABSTRACT. In this paper we study the dynamic relationship between the public debt ratio and the real interest rate. Specifically, by means of a macroeconomic model of simultaneous difference equations - one for the debt ratio and the other for the real interest rate - we focus on the role of monetary policy, fiscal policy, and risk premium in affecting the stability of the debt ratio and the existence of steady states, if any. We show that, in a dynamic framework, fiscal rules may not be enough to control the pattern of the debt ratio, and the adoption of a monetary policy, in the form of an interest rate rule, is necessary to control the pattern of the debt ratio for assuring its sustainability over time. Notably, the creation or disappearance of steady states, or periodic (stable) cycles, can generate scenarios of multistability. While we obtain clear evidence that an active monetary policy has a stabilizing effect on both the real interest rate and the debt ratio, we also find that, in some scenarios, fiscal policy is not sufficient to avoid explosive patterns of the debt ratio.

ABSTRACT. Relying on a survey conducted with more than 4,500 Italian women in July 2020, we address the link between gender stereotypes and perceptions of domestic violence (i.e., its spread, severity, causes, and hypothetical advices offered to victims). We define a new measure of stereotypes at the individual level and show that women with stronger stereotypes are less likely to declare that violence is common in their area of residence and are more likely to classify physical violence as less severe than control over a victim's interpersonal contacts or access to financial resources. They are also more likely to attribute violent behaviours to event-specific circumstances (e.g.,economic distress) rather than personal characteristics of abusers (e.g., psychological issues), and to advise a hypothetical victim not to react to DV rather than to look for formal help. The results hold when we include area-of-residence fixed effects and controls for a broad set of individual and neighborhood characteristics, including social norms in the birth region and the impact of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic on the respondents' personal and economic conditions. Several transformations of our stereotype index do not affect our findings. It appears that the tendency to perceive physical violence as less severe is associated with a victim-blaming approach among respondents with more stereotypical beliefs on gender roles.

ABSTRACT. This paper documents the existence of an intensive margin of the gender gap in innovative entrepreneurship: not only there are fewer women than men who become entrepreneurs, but female founders have smaller equity holdings, make smaller investments, and are less likely to be the executive of the firm compared to male founders. Exploiting the deregulation of emergency contraception in Italy, combined with variation in access to abortion services, I find that reducing maternity risk helps to close these gaps and makes female-held firms more likely to attract venture capital and enter liquidation in their early stages.

ABSTRACT. Exploiting high-frequency data from the Italian anti-violence helpline and a unique geolocalized dataset on killings of women, we show that the news coverage of a femicide triggers an increase in calls to the helpline. The effect is detectable in the week following the news and in the province where the femicide has occurred. These findings are consistent with a model in which the news of a femicide increase expectations about future intimate partner violence in case no call is made.

ABSTRACT. Globally, 1 in 3 women experience violence mostly by an intimate partner. Gender violence often results from differences in economic opportunities (payoffs), but may also be explained by psychological factors such as \textit{anger} driven by frustration. We study this second channel by modeling a male-female interaction through a two-stage game, where partners play a Trust Minigame first (\textit{relationship phase}), followed by a Dictator game (\textit{punishment phase}). When males rely on gender stereotypes and expect females to be more cooperative than males at equilibrium, we predict that females get punished more often and more severely the higher the expectation about their cooperation. We also derive other testable predictions that we test in an online experiment. Finally, we correlate individual behavior observed in the experiment with cultural and historical proxies of gender stereotypes.

ABSTRACT. We analyse the relationship between health spending and ageing in a macroeconomic framework, using data from Italian regions in the period from 1996 to 2017. Our results point to a positive and significant effect of ageing on per-capita healthcare expenditure growth over twenty years. However, this effect is not driven by the ``very elderly'' (i.e., those older than 85 years) but by the ``elderly'' (i.e., with age between 65 and 85). Second, surprisingly, we find no effect for the first and the second lead of cancer and cardiocirculatory mortality rates, used to proxy the demand for healthcare services in the last two years of life. Third, according to our estimates healthcare expenditure is driven by the rate of hospital beds per inhabitant, suggesting the presence of potential supplier-induced demand. Finally, we find that regions under recovery plans reduce the rate of growth of per-capita healthcare expenditure.

ABSTRACT. Pre-surgery waiting times are viewed as a process indicator of the quality of care for hip fracture surgeries. International clinical guidelines recommend that these treatments are performed within two days after hospitalisation. In year 2011, the Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region incentivised hospitals to achieve the target of two days for pre-surgery waiting times, by allowing the chief executives of Local Health Authorities and Hospital Trusts to receive greater rewards if they managed to achieve a higher proportion of hip fracture patients treated within the threshold. We analyse the effect of this policy by applying a difference-in-differences estimation strategy to patient-level data between 2007 and 2016. We find that the introduction of managerial incentives reduced hip fracture surgery delays with differences between the treated and control groups increasing over time. There is also evidence of a convergence in the pre-operative waiting times across hospitals, with those experiencing longer surgery delays in the pre-policy period achieving the greatest reductions after policy implementation. Finally, our findings lend support to the hypothesis that hospitals reacted to the policy by targeting patients with less severe health conditions as recorded at the time of hospital admission.

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates the population-wide health effects of the amalgamation of local health departments in Italy. We focus on the evolution of municipality-level mortality from the years 2002-2018. We exploit the within municipality variation over time and the staggered adoption of the consolidation reform in different years by using an event study design. We deal with heterogeneous treatment effects over time and across municipalities by using the interaction-weighted estimator by Sun and Abraham (2021) to region-cohort-specific heterogeneity. The reform led to an average increase in the overall population mortality rate of nearly 1%. We show that the increase pops up in the medium and long-term: 16 additional deaths per hundred thousand, an increase of 1.9%, 4-7 years after the consolidation; 21 deaths, 2.4% in percentage terms, after 8-10 years. The overall effect is mostly driven by mortality for non-amenable conditions and circulatory system diseases. Potential mechanisms are unfolded by considering mortality rates for different age groups, leading causes of death and geographical heterogeneity of the effect.

ABSTRACT. Il 2022 ha visto l’introduzione di due misure di ampia portata che hanno apportato modifiche di rilievo al sistema del prelievo fiscale e a quello del sostegno al reddito delle famiglie: l’introduzione dell’Assegno Unico Universale (AUU) per le famiglie con figli sotto i 21 anni di età e la revisione della struttura dell’imposta sulle persone fisiche, l’Irpef. Il presente lavoro ha l’obiettivo di mostrare l’effetto congiunto e disgiunto dell’introduzione dei due interventi in termini di equità e di efficienza, quest’ultima condotta attraverso un’analisi degli effetti sull’offerta di lavoro femminile in Italia grazie allo sviluppo del “TAX BEN-DF (II)”, un nuovo modello di microsimulazione di tipo comportamentale costruito dal Dipartimento delle Finanze in collaborazione con il national team italiano di EUROMOD. I risultati risultano robusti dal confronto con quelli del modello di offerta di lavoro basato su EUROMOD e mostrano effetti redistributivi apprezzabili e una struttura piuttosto progressiva per l’attuale AUU, con impatti opposti sull’offerta di lavoro delle donne single (in diminuzione) e in coppia ( in aumento), mentre la revisione dell’Irpef, pur concentrando i suoi effetti sulle classi di reddito medio-alte, induce una riduzione generalizzata della pressione fiscale incentivando l’offerta di lavoro femminile per donne sia single sia in coppia. Attraverso la comparazione di due modelli di AUU alternativi a quello vigente, si verifica l’esistenza di un trade-off tra equità e efficienza.

ABSTRACT. This paper shows that a Vat structure with multiple tax rates in Italy is not the most effective way to pursue redistributive aims. As the tax revenue of the Italian Vat is particularly affected by the use of reduced tax rates and exemptions, compared to other European countries, we suggest that a shift to a uniform Vat associated to cash transfers to households with children might better achieve redistributive targets on the neediest part of the population. This outcome could even be potentially improved by considering that a uniform Vat may significantly reduce Vat evasion due to the difference of tax rates applied to sales and purchases.

ABSTRACT. In this paper we study how the redistributive effect of taxes and cash transfers on Italian households’ incomes has changed from 1974 to 2022. In order to focus on the role of the policy rules, we keep constant the socio‐demographic and economic structure of the population, and simulate on this distribution the rules of the tax‐benefit system that were in force in different years. The main result is that redistribution has significantly increased over this period. We discuss also who were the major gainers and losers from these changes, and which factors might contribute to explain them.

ABSTRACT. This paper is about the horizontal inequity of the Italian tax-benefit system and the joint impact of recent changes to the direct taxation system, family allowances and child benefits. The IT-EXEMPT static microsimulation model is employed to compare a scenario that replicates the tax-benefit system as of 2019 with a scenario that incorporates the changes to PIT and Bonus Irpef in the period 2020-2022 and simulates the introduction of the Assegno unico e universale. The comparison focuses above all on the results of the decomposition approach put forward by Duclos et al. (2003). The classical horizontal inequity effect is broken down by population groups. The analysis shows a generalised reduction of horizontal inequity following the legislative changes. The categories that benefit most are high-income individuals, graduates, individuals whose household income is made up primarily of self-employment income or retirement income, individuals belonging to households without children, and those with four or more children among individuals with children.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this paper is to empirically test the impact of social contacts on the individual unemployment risk and the probability of persisting unemployed over time controlling for the local context where the individual lives and creates friendships. We present evidence for a highly significant impact of social contacts on individual unemployment risk: social contacts reduce both the unemployment risk and the state dependence in unemployment. The disadvantage from having been unemployed in the previous period is smaller for individual with many social contacts and larger for individuals with limited social contacts. We assume that social interactions happen mainly locally in the neighborhood. We present evidence that neighborhood deprivation increases the individual unemployment risk, while neighborhood cohesion reduces the probability of unemployment in deprived neighborhood. These findings are consistent with the idea that individuals obtain information about job opportunities through a network of social contacts and unemployment may lead to a decay of social capital, making it more difficult to find employment in future periods.

ABSTRACT. Shocks to health have been shown to reduce labour supply for the individual affected. Less is known about household self-insurance through a partner’s response to a health shock. Previous studies have presented inconclusive empirical evidence on the existence of a health-related `added worker effect’, and results limited to labour and income responses. We use UK longitudinal data to investigate within households both the labour supply and informal care responses of an individual to the event of an acute health shock to their partner. Relying on the unanticipated timing of shocks, we combine coarsened exact matching and entropy balancing algorithms with parametric analysis and exploit lagged outcomes to remove bias from observed confounders and time-invariant unobservables. We find no evidence of a health-related ‘added worker effect’. A significant and sizeable increase in spousal informal care, irrespective of spousal labour market position or household financial status and ability to purchase formal care provision, suggests a substitution to informal care provision, at the expense of time devoted to leisure activities.

ABSTRACT. Since the 1980s, most of the advanced economies have massively ‘flexibilized’ their labour markets, by reducing protection against layoffs or introducing temporary and flexible contractual forms. In the meanwhile, i.e. in the last forty years, a stylized fact of economic theory has come undone: the stability of the wage share of income. A significant compression in the wage share has indeed been observed in most countries in the last decades. In this contribution we evaluate the role of the deregulation of the fixed term contracts on the functional distribution of income. Using Jorda’s local projection method in a panel of 18 advanced countries we find a significatively negative effect of the labour market liberalization on the share of income accrued by labour. Such findings invite to a rethinking of the public policies if we want to face the increasing inequalities.

ABSTRACT. In this paper we analyze the effects of a policy easing early retirement that was adopted in Italy in 2019. The policy of interest, the so-called Quota 100, lowered overnight the age and years of contributions required for retirement. We appraise its effects on hiring and its internal labor market spillovers in terms of employee advancements. We also look at its implications for the firm overall wage bill. Our preliminary results show that early retirement does not affect firm hiring decisions.

ABSTRACT. The basic proposition is that the formation of a new state can occur through a shift in the boundaries of another state – that is, through internal exit – when certain circumstances about ecology, population density, institutions, and political power concurrently manifest. Together, these exogenous circumstances help to define the rational-choice problem faced, which endogenizes the size of the object being contested, namely people. The more are the people in a state, the larger is the public revenue from which the state can slice off a surplus, i.e. that appropriable rent that is beyond the cost of public good supply. This rent-seeking window leads to two opposite economic forces that put pressure on state scope: the attempt of an existing state to at minimum maintain its population and the attempt of a subset of the state's population to form a new state. We characterize the interplay of these forces through a factually-grounded political economy model of state formation through internal exit that allows the derivation of novel conditions for state boundary determination. The setting is southern Africa, circa 1500-1910, where the record shows that autochthonous states formed by fission. The proposed political economy characterization is counterfactually robust. While the characterization draws inspiration mainly from southern Africa state formation, it may be valuable for other contexts too. For example, it may be applied, mutatis mutandis, to study contemporary societies with separatist movements.

ABSTRACT. This paper proposes the first game theoretical model of technocratic governments, i.e. cases where a non political technocrat is put in charge by political parties. Based on the literature on post-electoral politics and agenda setting, we show conditions for the existence of a technocratic government equilibrium, where both parties agree to delegate the agenda setting power to technocrats, committed to maximize social welfare. Such an equilibrium exists only if the technocrats have a superior competence with respect to the majority party/coalition, or if the country is in a sufficiently important economic crisis. Furthermore, it is more likely to exist in countries with unstable parliament (i.e. one where the governing coalition is not always able to impose its will) and where parties care about the common value dimension, vis-a-vis the ideological one. Finally, we show that polarization increases the set of parameters where the technocratic government equilibrium exists, when parliament is unstable, but it has no effect when the governing majority is sufficiently strong.

ABSTRACT. Institutions matter for the political choice of policies. We study, theoretically and empirically, how different electoral systems affect the immigration policy of a country or city, zooming on the labor market as the main source of heterogeneous economic preferences on immigration. The general result is that a polity is more open to immigration the less likely it is that policymaking can be determined by a single group of voters constituting a plurality winning party but not holding an absolute majority. There is evidence for this result at all levels in terms of correlations, and we establish causality via regression discontinuity design for the Italian case.

ABSTRACT. Does political transparency influence voting behavior? We created a website (www.elezionitrasparentiroma.it) with a set of transparency information regarding candidates for the recent municipal election of Rome, Italy, in October 2021. The collection of transparency information published on the website derived from a law to curb corruption in Italy that required parties to publish their candidates’ criminal record certificates, curriculum vitae, and previous political experience. We evaluate the campaign’s effectiveness by inviting a randomly selected group of voters to visit the website just a few days before the election. We find that voters who saw the website - compared to another randomly selected group who were not invited and did not visit the website - voted like their counterparts. We do not find effects on the preferences for councilors nor the probability of turnout and expression of preferences. However, voters who visited the website were significantly more likely to vote for the incumbent mayor Virginia Raggi, the Five Star Movement candidate. We read these results in light of the Five Star Movement’s role in promoting political transparency in the last decade. We discuss the limitation of these results and interpretations.

ABSTRACT. This paper uses novel quarterly data on the distribution of US household wealth to document several facts about the distributional consequences of expansionary conventional and unconventional monetary policy. After showing the large heterogeneity in the composition of household portfolios across the wealth distribution, we use an internal instrument approach in a Bayesian VAR to show that: (i) Despite raising the wealth level of all households, monetary policy shocks shift the distribution of wealth towards the top tail. (ii) The consequences of monetary policy shocks on wealth shares are temporary and more pronounced in the case of unconventional monetary policy. (iii) The effects of monetary policy shocks across wealth groups are more heterogeneous for right-skewed distributed asset classes, such as equities and liquid assets. (iv) Using a counterfactual exercise to capture the portfolio composition channel, we show that both monetary policy shocks affect wealth inequality primarily via the stock market than through the housing market.

ABSTRACT. This paper studies the effect of the 1348 plague on the structure of power in Venetia. Using data from “The Rulers of Venice, 1332-1524” dataset, we operationalize the Venetian structure of power as a two-mode network where relevant political families are associated with the offices its members were elected. After the Black Death shock, major families managed to cling on power, preventing newcomers to climb the ladder of public offices.

ABSTRACT. Based on the T-DYMM model and starting from a 2015 administrative-survey sample of the Italian population, this paper simulates individual and household economic trajectories up to 2070 in order to focus on the long-term transmission of income and wealth inequality via inter-generational transfers (inter-vivos donations and bequests). The model features probabilistic demographic events (births, marriages, realistic patterns of fertility and mortality, assortative mating based on education), main labour market choices and outcomes and pension incomes at the individual level (heterogeneous skill endowments, careers and earnings), the basic elements of progressive personal and real taxes as well as consumption, savings and wealth transmission at the household level. Among the main findings, we show that whether significant changes in behaviours and policy will not occur, net wealth inequality is expected to remain fairly stable until 2040 and then progressively increase in subsequent years. According to our model, the drivers of such boost are financial returns and - above all - inter-generational transfers (especially bequests) that are supposed to increase around that time due to the final transmission between baby boomers towards gen X and the beginning of that between Gen X-ers and Gen Y. On the other hand, private savings, widespread real estate returns and, to a lesser extent, taxes and public transfers would play a curbing role on inequality. Market income inequality is expected to slightly increase in the long-run, especially among the elderly, as opposed to an expected reduction in inequality in public pension incomes. Such an increase is driven by increasing inequality in capital incomes and it is greater the greater is the return on investment scenario assumed.

ABSTRACT. This paper analyses the consequences on demographic changes observed in the municipalities of Abruzzo region after the earthquake of L'Aquila in 2009. Relying on Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat) data on the population in the municipalities, we aim to understand how population growth changed after the earthquake, analyzing population dynamics both in the municipalities affected by the earthquake and in the other municipalities of the Abruzzo region. We apply a spatial regression model to understand the associations between population growth, the earthquake, and some demographic and economic variables, taking into account the spatial autocorrelation. The results of the multivariate models confirm the importance of the space and the close association of the population dynamics after the earthquake with the population age structure, both in the pre-existing situation and in the subsequent dynamics. A destructive earthquake implies a tremendous shock, however, in places that are already suffering from demographic, social, and economic fragility, pre-existing factors can act equally or even more strongly on the population dynamics.

ABSTRACT. This paper estimates the impact of floods hitting the Italian metropolitan areas throughout the last two decades in terms of households' propensity to outmigrate (exit) and attitudes towards political participation (turnout, voting) of those that decide not to move out of flooded localities (voice). The empirical analysis also relies of a unique high-frequency internal migration dataset (monthly out-migration and in-migration flows at the municipal level), detailed information on local government election results, and comprehensive public budgetary figures during the past two decades. Preliminary empirical evidence suggests that floods have no impact on in-migration and out-migration flows, while their electoral consequences can be substantial, with the incumbent gaining at least ten percentage points if a flood occurred during the term of office.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, we analyze the migration responses to natural disasters by focusing on the three most devastating earthquakes that occurred in Italy during the last decades: L’Aquila 2009, Emilia Romagna 2012, and Central Italy 2016. Using municipality-level data for the years 2002-2019 and adopting a new Difference-in-Difference (DID) approach with multiple time periods and multiple groups, we evaluate the causal effect of these three events on internal and international inbound and outbound migration of both Italian and foreign citizens. The results suggest that, despite the massive destruction, there is no evidence that these earthquakes had a large impact on the migration of Italian citizens. We only found evidence of the impact of the earthquake in L’Aquila on the internal migration of foreign citizens.

ABSTRACT. Natural disasters such as earthquakes, can cause severe loss of human lives and have direct and indirect economic impacts. However, the existing literature offers inconclusive answers regarding their effect on economic growth. Most studies on natural disasters consider different types of disasters at the same time: very few of them focused on earthquakes. Our aim is to quantify earthquakes' economy-wide (provincial level) and sector-specific impacts. This type of analysis could help policymakers to adopt appropriate measures in the aftermath of a disaster. In particular, in this paper, we want to investigate the consequences of two recent earthquakes that occurred in Italy in 2009 (“L’Aquila”), and in 2012 (“Pianura Emiliana”) using the Synthetic Difference-in-Differences (SDID). SDID is a new estimator for causal effects that builds on insight behind the difference-in-differences and synthetic control methods.

ABSTRACT. The smoking ban policy was introduced in UK with the aim to prohibit smoking in outdoor public places, such as bar and restaurants, and also in private workplaces. The aim of this smoking ban policy is twofold: firstly avoiding second-hand smoke effects on non-smokers individuals, secondly reducing the consumption of cigarettes. By using the British Household Panel Survey, after an initial evaluation of the impact of smoking bans on active smoking in the UK, the aim of this work is to use a casual empirical design in order to analyse if the smoking ban policy impact changes due to the parental smoking behaviour impact on young adults smoking habits. Considering the cigarettes consumption of young adults, if the parents are light/moderate smokers, the probability of light young adults smokers increases, whereas the probability of moderate young adults smokers decreases. Further, the probability of moderate young adult smoker increases if parents are heavy smokers. Finally, if the parents are heavy smokers the probability of heavy young adults smokers decreases. However, all the interaction effects are not statistically significant, confirming the limited impact of the smoking ban policy also considering the parental smoking behaviour.

ABSTRACT. We empirically investigate the intergenerational transmission of cultural values at the interplay between parental effects and the reference social context (“ecology” as defined by Blume et al. (2011)). We exploit questions from a survey of schooled teenagers in the Southern Italian city of Palermo designed to measure the cultural values of students, their parents/carers, friends and neighbours. Using data reduction technique, we obtain two multidimensional cultural values indicators, which, borrowing from the social norms literature, can be associated with attitudes toward injunctive norms denoting conformity and attitudes toward descriptive norms denoting autonomy. We then estimate the process of cultural transmission of these values by augmenting a linear-in-means social interactions model with direct measures of intragenerational peer effects and intergenerational effects and by allowing, for the latter, ecology-level random intercepts and slopes. The results corroborate the importance of endogenous and direct peer effects for the accumulation of individual cultural values. Intragenerational (between peers) and intergenerational (parental) investments exert different influence on the transmission of values. The former is more important for autonomy; the latter mainly affect conformity. Further, we find heterogeneity in the parental transmission across ecologies with convergence by cultural assimilation towards peers (and divergence from parents) for those children who come from households with low values. Such assimilation effect is particularly evident when considering classrooms as reference ecologies, indicating a noteworthy role of places of education in shaping the cultural values of a community.

ABSTRACT. This paper studies the impact of family background on the early careers of Italian graduates. We exploit a dataset of mixed survey and administrative data on graduates at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. We analyze the impact of parent’s education on students probability to find a job one year after graduation and on the correspondent wage level. Parental education results to be strongly significant also when controlling for the huge set of individual level variables which accounts for the whole education process from the high school to graduation. Delving deeper into the analysis in search of possible mechanisms underlying this relationship, we find a very strong heterogeneity by graduation field. Such findings contribute to the recent literature claiming intergenerational transmission of in- equalities to rely not only in the unequal transmission of productive abilities but also on other traits that are rewarded when markets are not competitive and wages are set according to rent sharing processes.

ABSTRACT. This article uses national identity to address two questions relating to second-generation immigrants’ assimilation using data from Understanding Society. We investigate the dimension and the main drivers of national identity among people aged 16-25 living in the UK. We analyse to what extent this process is related to the transmission of identity from one generation to the next and driven by specific parental features. We find that second-generation assimilation is correlated with receiving educational grants, and with the household financial conditions. The first result is consistent with fair reciprocity theory, the second highly penalises second-generation daughters. We show a strong intergenerational transmission of assimilation from one generation to the next, with parents having different roles in shaping their children’s identities. Mothers’ identification with the host country has a direct and major role in shaping both sons’ and daughters’ assimilation. Fathers indirectly influence children’s assimilation, through their educational achievements and naturalization process, the last having a positive correlation with daughters’ identity. Overall, sons are influenced by their parents’ education, daughters are affected by the household economic conditions and by parents’ assimilation.

ABSTRACT. This paper studies the impact of UNESCO World Heritage List (WHL) designation on real estate prices and personal incomes of the Italian localities having their sites designated during the past two decades. To identify the causal impact of WHL inscription separately from the effect of public and private investments that stakeholders might have performed to boost sites’ chances of inscription (e.g., transportation infrastructures or promotional expenditures), we exploit information on the timing of earlier registration of sites in the national ‘tentative list’ (i.e., list of candidate sites for WHL nomination in the future). The evidence from an event study analysis suggests that most of the increase in real estate prices occurs right after inclusion of sites in the national tentative list, while rises in income level and inequality in the community follow WHL designation. Possible explanations for these effects and their underlying mechanisms are discussed.

ABSTRACT. This work analyses the economic impact generated by a cultural event such as the European Capital of Culture. We used a difference in differences approach to compare the Italian city of Matera, formally designated in 2014 and which hosted the event in 2019, with the other candidate cities. Our research finds that tourist flows and employment increase in the post-treatment years when compared to the pre treatment years, while added value does not record significant changes. This result suggests the importance of the event and supports claims that it serves as a catalyst for tourism and employment.

ABSTRACT. Macroeconomic theory documents four fundamental causes of growth: luck, geography, culture and institutions (Acemoglu, 2009). We test the relevance of those factors across a set of European regions. In a recent contribution, Tabellini (2010) estimates the impact of culture on the economic development of Western Europe, finding that the latter can explain the large differences in economic development among European regions. In this paper, we show that the aforementioned analysis does not adequately assess the impact of culture, since it fails to take into consideration the role played by geography. Using the same dataset in Tabellini (2010), we aim at filling such a gap, showing that the impact of culture is over–estimated, while its impact is correctly evaluated, if we account for regional spill–overs. In addition, we expand the model by including a proxy for the quality of institutions and one for the amount of natural resources, to control for the additional variables that the literature indicates as crucial driver of economic development. The inclusion of the aforementioned variables allows us to further underline the crucial role played by geography. In fact, if the impact of culture does not dramatically change, when we control for the quality of institutions and the extent of natural resources, then the trajectory of development in the European regions under analysis and, more importantly, the difference in the results with respect to the results in Tabellini (2010) are strongly influenced by the unchanged geographic factor.

ABSTRACT. This paper analyzes the influence of partisan content from national cable TV news on local reporting in U.S. newspapers. We provide a new machine-learning-based measure of cable news slant, trained on a corpus of 40K transcribed TV episodes from Fox News Channel (FNC), CNN, and MSNBC (2005-2008). Applying the method to a corpus of 24M local newspaper articles, we find that in response to an exogenous increase in local viewership of FNC relative to CNN/MSNBC, local newspaper articles become more similar to FNC transcripts (and vice versa). Consistent with newspapers responding to changes in reader preferences, we see a shift in the framing of local news coverage rather than just direct borrowing of cable news content. Further, cable news slant polarizes local news content: right-leaning newspapers tend to adopt right-wing FNC language, while left-leaning newspapers tend to become more left-wing. Media slant is contagious.

ABSTRACT. We explore the economic feasibility of a payment scheme for some ecosystem services of mountain grasslands and pastures located in the Alps and in the Italian Apennines. The services are potentially embedded in dairy products: traditional mountain livestock farms use them as inputs, with direct beneficial effects on ecosystem conservation, and consumers may be willing to pay more for dairy products if provided with credible evidence that the ecosystem services were used. Local institutions contributing certification and monitoring would overcome the current inability of small farms to market these characteristics of their product. We use a discrete choice experiment to estimate the preferences of a large representative sample of Italian cheese consumers concerning the selected ecosystem services. The willingness-to-pay associated with the services is sufficiently large to easily support the payment scheme.

ABSTRACT. Child mobility is a relevant phenomenon all over the world, and it is more so in developing countries, where it is made worse by income conditions in rural households. At the same time, shocks related to climate change are increasingly hitting several countries, generating a reduction in agricultural output and, as a result, increasing difficulties in feeding and growing children in rural areas. This paper aims to move the first step in investigating the role of climate change in driving rural households’ critical decisions, with specific attention to child mobility. To this end, we first investigate the determinants of child mobility and then its impact on households’ welfare. By adopting Uganda as a relevant case study, the analysis is developed using longitudinal data on Ugandan rural households for the waves 2009-10, 2010-11, 2011-12 and 2013-14 collected in World Bank Living Standards Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture. Preliminary results confirm the relevance of climate shocks, as measured by the SPEI, as drivers of children's mobility. We can therefore expect that policies encouraging rural households’ resilience to climatic shocks may have a virtuous indirect impact, reducing the number of children who are forced to leave their households.

ABSTRACT. La lotta al cambiamento climatico e la strategia per la transizione energetica che costituiscono i perni dell’azione europea e del governo nazionale determinano necessariamente nel breve periodo degli oneri di aggiustamento per il sistema sociale e produttivo. A questi si sono aggiunti negli ultimi mesi improvvisi e consistenti aumenti dei prezzi internazionali del gas che hanno iniziato ad avere effetti sulle bollette delle utilities e dunque sul paniere di consumo delle famiglie. Si tratta di aumenti incredibilmente forti: il prezzo del gas per la famiglia di medio consumo è quasi raddoppiato passando da 74.56 centesimi di euro per metro cubo del primo trimestre 2020 a 137,32 di gennaio 2022. E’ ovvio che questo quadro di prezzi, se protratto nel tempo, metterebbe fortemente sotto pressione il reddito disponibile delle famiglie e potrebbe esacerbare il problema della povertà energetica , già molto elevata nel nostro paese. Per sterilizzare in parte questi effetti, anche in coerenza con la posizione della Commissione , il governo è intervenuto a diverse riprese. In particolare, sono stati previsti interventi sia attraverso la riduzione delle componenti tariffarie dei beni energetici, sia attraverso il potenziamento dei bonus sociali e l’attivazione di una indennità una tantum di 200 euro. La ricerca, attraverso l’utilizzo del modello di microsimulazione dell’Ufficio parlamentare di bilancio si propone di analizzare l’impatto sulla povertà energetica e in generale gli effetti distributivi dell’aumento della spesa causato dalla crescita dei prezzi degli ultimi 12 mesi per i beni energetici e non, evidenziando inoltre l’impatto distributivo degli interventi di sostegno disposti dal Governo a partire dal terzo trimestre 2021 per giungere a una quantificazione dell’effetto netto sulle famiglie del rincaro dei prezzi e delle misure di sostegno.

ABSTRACT. The need for reforming and modernise the tax system to increase tax efficiency, improve environmental sustainability and regional economic outcomes, is one of the key objectives of Italy, in line with the EU strategy. Within the framework of the European Green Deal, Italy committed to contributing turning the EU into the first climate neutral region by 2050 (“Fit for 55” package): the goal is to reduce emissions by at least 55% by 2030, compared to 1990 levels. Carbon pricing is at the core of the proposal, but its full implementation is also expected to have regressive effects harming poorer households and adverse economic impacts reducing firms’ competitiveness. This paper evaluates the effects of the carbon pricing proposal of the fitfor55 package on welfare, sectoral production and income distribution. To tackle the adverse social and economic effects, it compares different revenue recycling schemes shifting the tax burden from labour or capital and consider all major direct and indirect taxes. It finds that well-targeted revenue recycling policies might significantly reduce the negative effects. We adopt the IRENCGE-DF Model, a new (recursive) dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model developed by the Italian Ministry of the Economy and the World Bank. It has detailed energy specification that allows for capital/labour/energy substitution in production, intra-fuel energy substitution across all demand agents, multi-output multi-input production structure, an extended energy system with 11 different types of technologies, multiple Households to address distributional impacts, and detailed information on the Italian tax system.

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates the relationship between transparency and election (and re-election) of female Mayor and Municipal councilors in a large sample of Italian municipalities, building on Albanese et al. (2021). We address the causality issue between female political participation and transparency and investigates whether there is a political payoff for female Mayors in more transparent municipalities and if this result depends on civic capital.

ABSTRACT. We study whether and how the family organization shapes individual preferences on public childcare provision. Then, we investigate whether politicians' incentives reflect the family organization that prevails among their voters. To avoid reverse causality problems, we proxy the current family organization with historical family principles that regulated relationships among different generations: the family living arrangement based on cohabitation,that measures the possibility to rely on other family members to satisfy care needs, and the inheritance rule, that measures how much the offspring is dependent on parental financial help. We find that U.S. citizens whose background is based on large and cohabiting families rely less on the Government as provider for external childcare; on the contrary, traditional financial dependency on parents make individuals more prone to ask for the Government's intervention. Representatives of U.S. districts where these backgrounds are dominant, are respectively less and more prone to vote for childcare interventions. Finally, these different family principles also affect the composition of representatives: the probability that a democratic is elected is respectively lower and higher.

ABSTRACT. Nineteenth-century social reformers promoted the establishment of kindergartens as a remedy for the problems associated with industrialization and immigration. We evaluate the impact that the rollout of the first kindergartens in American cities had on mothers and their children. Consistent with the predictions of a quantity-quality trade-off model, immigrant families exposed to kindergartens significantly reduced fertility. Their offspring at age 10-15 were more likely to attend school, they worked less, and as adults, they had fewer children. We also unveil positive language spillover effects of kindergarten education on immigrant mothers illustrating the importance of kindergartens for social integration.

ABSTRACT. This paper provides novel evidence on how a sharp increase in labour force participation among older women affects the provision of informal care to their older parents. Based on data from Understanding Society -the UK Household Longitudinal Study, we use an instrumental variable approach that exploits a unique reform that increased the female State Pension-age by up to 6 years. Our results provide evidence of a trade-off between the intensive margin of work and informal care provided outside the household: an increase of 10 hours of work per week reduces the provision of informal care by 2.1 hours a week, which amounts to roughly £2,100 of yearly care-hours lost. This reduction in caregiving is largest among women working in physically or psychosocially demanding jobs, and "sandwich" generation women who have both a living grandchild and a parent alive. Using data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, we show that older parents whose daughters became ineligible to claim their pension experienced a significant reduction in the amount of care they receive from their daughters, which was not compensated by an increase in formal care or other sources of support. Our results suggest that policies that increase older workers’ labour supply require changes in long-term care policy that compensate for the loss of informal care.

ABSTRACT. We study the effects of receiving immunisation from Covid-19 on households’ economic insecurity. To provide causal estimates we use a fuzzy regression discontinuity design (RDD) which takes advantage of the United Kingdom’s immunisation plan. The plan was primarily based on age, granting differential eligibility to proximate cohorts. We estimate local average treatment effects (LATE) on perceived levels of economic insecurity, today and in the future. We find that immunisation triggered less pessimistic financial feelings, among the vaccinated interviewees, particularly when looking at 3 months ahead. Using a difference-in-discontinuity design we next document that immunisation was more salient for women as well as for large households with children. Our results indicate that the mass immunisation campaign against Covid-19 had relevant short-run economic effects, well beyond its expected impact on people’s health.

ABSTRACT. Cancer is the second most important cause of death at the international level. Moreover, the cancer burden is persistently growing globally, with serious financial concerns for both individuals and health systems (WHO, 2022). In this scenario, one of the main challenges faced by national health services is to establish a uniform model of care provision that ensures equitable access to treatment for patients in need, without risk of financial “toxicity” as a result of disease or treatment decisions (Ginsburg et al. 2017). This aim is particularly problematic where, as in Italy, decentralization has led to an increase in the heterogeneity of health care services at the regional level, exacerbating disparities in access to care. Patients’ freedom of choice of where to be treated, along with their quest for high-specialized oncology treatments, stimulate significant flows of mobility both within and between Italian regions. Patient mobility carries with it relevant financial burdens for both individuals and their regional health systems of origin. These consist, on the one hand of the increasing out-of-pocket expenses in charge of patients due to transportation and accommodation costs, and, on the other hand, of the significant financial transfers between regions to reimburse health treatments delivered to non-resident citizens. All this considered, in this study we investigate the relationship between the regional configuration of health systems and the geographical mobility of patients over time. We use data derived from the Hospital Discharge Records (2009-2019), including detailed information on hospital stays of cancer patients. According to the International Classification of Disease (ICD-9-CM), we focus on single cancer types to reconstruct the flows of patients across and within regions over time. This primary distinction allows to disentangle health needs met in the region of residence with respect to those satisfied under interregional mobility, which implies serious concerns in terms of citizens’ unequal health care opportunities. Moreover, we analyze both itra- and inter-regional mobility according to the characteristics of the health facilities, so as to identify the structural properties which may encourage patients to travel for care. Specifically, we explore whether the flows are directed towards health providers high-specialized in the delivery of cancer-specific treatments, looking at both their structural characteristics and the volume of clinical activities. Once described the mobility patterns according to the supply-side of health care, we focus on individual characteristics, clustering patients on the basis of their personal features able to contribute to the choice of travelling in search for adequate care.

ABSTRACT. Reducing unfair and unjust health inequalities is a primary objective of public health policy. Strong evidence exists for a socio-economic gradient in health in many countries around the world, with those from the most affluent backgrounds expecting to live up to ten years longer and in good health than those from disadvantaged backgrounds. In England, local governments are responsible for public health and to address health inequity have funded proportionate universal, population-level actions to promote healthy behaviours, such as physical activity. Examples of these interventions include building cycleways, renovating public parks and offering free access to public leisure centre-based exercise sessions in deprived city areas. Notwithstanding the potential for these interventions to lead to positive distributional intervention effects, whether health inequity gaps will be reduced as a result depends on the relative improvements in health by the socio-economic groups impacted by the intervention and how these effects are modelled.

To model how health equity changes as a result of positive distributional intervention effects, we develop a theoretical model where individual health status is a function of individual physical activity, relative deprivation of the neighbourhood, and other individual socio-economic characteristics. Our analysis classifies different public interventions aimed at improving physical activity inequality depending on their effect on health inequality. Then, we calibrate our model using published data on the Leeds Let us Get Active programme, implemented in Leeds, United Kingdom, between 2013 and 2016. Lastly, we empirically test our model using data from Understanding Society, a dataset of adults living in the United Kingdom from 2010 to 2021.

Our results show that a reduction in physical activity inequality does not necessarily lead to a reduction in health inequality. More specifically, while an intervention on physical activity can be progressive, the associated consequences for health may be progressive, flat, or regressive. Assumptions regarding the decay in and generalisability of intervention effects showed to play key roles in determining the direction of health equity impacts. In planning interventions to reduce health inequities, public health policymakers should carefully consider what distributional effects to target to avoid widening the existing health inequities across socio-economic groups.

ABSTRACT. According to the medical literature the slow diusion of generic in some EU Countries and elsewhere is due to misinformation and consumers misperception. We consider this result in a sequential model of perceived vertical dierentiation with information disparity, accounting for the persistent high prices of brand-name drugs facing generic entry at lower price, as an equilibrium of sequential models of price competition. We emphasize strategic complementarity and the eventuality of a second mover advantage for generic firms that the previous literature has failed to recognize. In such a new framework we can also reconsider the Generic Competition Paradox from the theoretical point of view. We start by analyzing a duopolistic model of pure price competition and extend it to the case of a single originator and multiple generic entrants competing a la Cournot. A further extension to the case with insurance and co-payments only implies an increase of equilibrium prices. The introduction of endogenous reference pricing can dampen equilibrium prices and induce pure price competition as in the first version of the model,implying no distortions. Finally, by considering the traditional agency version of healthcare we can incorporate into demand functions the support of brand name drugs by physicians and pharmacists. Such a support can really hamper generic diusion and is likely to imply a first mover advantage by the seller of the pioneering brand.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we intend to provide a stylized theoretical model of local railway passengers service which is able to account for the main specific characteristics of the sector, and in particular for the interactions between operators’ investment decisions under vertical separation. Second, we will use this theoretical framework to carry out both a normative analysis of the operators’ investment decisions and an assessment of the welfare effects of simple regulatory instruments. Our theoretical analysis will show that, because of this asymmetry of information of Train operating company about the productivity of the Infrastructure manager’s investment, the introduction of a regulatory instrument inducing the former to internalize the effect of her investment on the latter’s cost of providing access may be welfare reducing.

ABSTRACT. We study cycles of privatization and nationalization of natural monopoly industries in a dynamic model of the choice between private and public regimes for the ownership of the activities. We show that switches are driven by the intrinsic dynamics of capital accumulation under uncertainty about the rate of depreciation, and the reluctance of society to keep a failing governance mode.

ABSTRACT. In years of growing pharmaceutical spending, the adoption of new health technologies faces several regulatory hurdles. Such policies are typically studied at the country level, even though there are explicit and implicit channels that link decisions made in different countries. This can be relevant in the EU, where external reference pricing is widely adopted. This work exploits the IMS pricing database of cancer drugs approved by the European Medicine Agency between 2007 and 2017, in order to assess the impact of the pharmaceutical regulation change that occurred in Germany in 2011 (the AMNOG bill) on foreign pharmaceutical prices. We show that the impact on foreign prices depends on whether the foreign country includes Germany in its reference set and, symmetrically, if it enters Germany’s reference set. In particular, our diff-in-diff approach shows that the AMNOG reform led to a price reduction of products launched in countries that refer to Germany (indirect spillover effect), whereas products launched in countries referenced by Germany experienced a 5.48% price increase (strategic spillover effect).

ABSTRACT. We estimate the effect of local government expenditures on local economic activity. Following the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake, disaster relief grants from the Italian central government caused a large and unanticipated expansion in municipal government expenditures. Using a threshold in grant allocation to municipalities as an instrument, we find economic activity contracted similarly between municipalities that received grants and those that did not. The “disaster relief multiplier” is about zero and statistically below one. We provide evidence that suggests organized crime decreased the efficacy of grants. Our results contribute to the debate on the effects of COVID-19 recovery spending.

ABSTRACT. Assessing ex-post the performance in the execution of public works contracts has become a key concern for many countries. Indeed, public works contracts represent a major share of any country’s GDP and public expenditure budget. They constitute approximately 14% of the overall GDP in Europe, accounting for roughly 1.8 trillion euros each year (European Commission, 2016). Worldwide, 12 percent of global GDP (about 11 trillion dollars) is spent following procurement regulation (Bosio et al., 2022). These huge amounts provide a sound reason to verify efficiency and “value for money” in the use of public funds allocated to purchase goods, services and works. Along with this, measuring the performance of public works contracts constitutes the main pillar of a socially relevant policy learning process as it allows to answer the crucial question on whether and to what extent the procurement system of a given country is ultimately able to deliver public goods and services in accordance with the set objectives. From here, one can start to investigate the potential causes for any misalignment between established objectives and the actual results to help policy makers to implement the necessary reform actions. Generally, the efficient management of public works contracts can be measured alongside two dimensions: that relating to the characteristics of the work output (for example, the quality of the executed work, its adherence to predefined objectives, etc.) and that concerning the contract execution process. Regarding the latter issue, cost overruns and time delays are considered the most relevant expressions of inefficiency, mainly for their potential negative impact on the social welfare (Bandiera et al., 2009; Guccio et al. 2012a; Finocchiaro Castro et al. 2014). Factors leading to sub-optimal results in terms of cost overruns and time delays have been broadly investigated in empirical works (Guccio et al., 2014, Cavalieri et al., 2020, and Lisciandra et al. 2021, for a detailed review of the relevant literature). Such suboptimal results may reflect either passive waste or active waste (Bandiera et al., 2009). Passive waste refers to inefficiency in managing purchases due to poor design specification (Ganuza, 2007), inaccuracy in cost forecasting (Cantarelli et al. 2010) and optimism bias (Flyvbjerg 2005 and 2008), among others. Active waste comprises all opportunistic corruptive behaviours that give rise to a somewhat form of benefit (either direct or indirect) for the decision maker. Although the weight of passive waste is estimated to be four times stronger than the one of active waste (Bandiera et al., 2009), disentangling the effects of the two form of inefficiency is not trivial. Furthermore, it is acknowledged that the use of cost overrun and time delay to estimate contract execution performance implies two main drawbacks (Guccio et al., 2012b; Finocchiaro Castro et al., 2014). First, the two concepts only measure productivity but do not allow to compare the performance of a given procurer in carrying out the contract with any, however determined, efficient benchmark. Second, a prerequisite for the evaluation of the procurer’s overall performance in contract execution is to simultaneously consider extra costs and time. Therefore, the ex-post assessment of the relative performance of each public contract is based on benchmarking tools. Benchmarking techniques employed in the empirical literature for estimating public procurement’s relative efficiency can be broadly divided into two strands: that employing parametric methods (i.e. Stochastic Frontier Analysis, SFA) along the lines of Aigner et al. (1977) and Meeusen and van den Broeck (1977) and that using nonparametric envelopment estimators such as the Free Disposal Hull (FDH) estimators proposed by Deprins et al. (1984) or Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) estimators suggested by Farrell (1957) and then popularized by Charnes et al. (1978) and Banker et al. (1984). Both approaches are able to cope with multiple inputs and outputs, but the latter remains the most common as it requires mild assumptions on the production set, even though it is more sensitive to variable selection and data errors. Jointly and connected with the choice of the benchmarking tool, a crucial point is how to appropriately model the production function in terms of inputs and outputs. Indeed, little attention has been paid on this problem within the non-parametric empirical literature, The key issue relates to the so called “curse of dimensionality”, that is, the convergence rate of non-parametric efficiency estimators - such as FDH, CRS and VRS-DEA – gets slower (but at a different rate) for a given sample size when the number of inputs and outputs increase, whereas a richer set of inputs and outputs is often searched for to obtain a more comprehensive and precise picture of the production process. However, it is generally acknowledged that increasing the number of variables in the estimation of the frontier artificially increases the average efficiency scores as well as the number of points lying on the frontier. In addition, the choice of the estimator is not neutral, as the FDH is consistent even when the production set is not convex, in contrast with CRS- and VRS-DEA, but it also converges at a slower pace than the two alternatives. Reducing dimensionality may lessen the problem but it is subject to a trade-off: it improves estimation accuracy (i.e., mean-square errors decrease) at the expense of some loss of information. Several “rules of thumb” have been proposed in the literature for lower bounds on the sample size (e.g., Bowlin, 1987; 1998, Banker et al. 1989; Cooper et al. 2007; Cooper et al. 2011), and recently, Wilson (2018) developed three diagnostics to guide the choice of the estimator and the specification. As said, very often in the empirical literature the choice of one of the above methods is not properly justified, nor the statistical properties of the chosen estimator are either discussed or taken into account. The present work intends to fill this gap by investigating the issue with reference to the Italian procurement. As a standard, the Italian empirical literature based on DEA estimators models public procurement as a process where input vectors - in terms of the time and cost agreed upon in the contract - are needed to produce some outputs - in terms of the actual time and cost of public works execution (Guccio et al., 2012 and 2014; Finocchiaro Castro et al. 2014; Cavalieri et al., 2017 and 2018). Applying an input radial orientation approach, the most performing decision-making units (DMUs) are, then, those that employ the least amount of inputs. Starting from this parsimonious approach, to better disentangle the active waste component of inefficiency from the passive one, we try to enlarge the production set by including additional inputs and outputs at the contract level that are usually considered “red flags” for a potential risk of lack of transparency, discretion and, ultimately, corruption. In doing this, we are aware of the biases that can arise when dimensionality (i.e., the number of inputs and outputs) is increased. Therefore, we test the different model specifications with the three diagnostics theorized by Wilson (2018) and then applied by O’Loughlin and Wilson (2021), to check whether dimension reduction might be necessary for the sake of estimation efficiency. Specifically, Wilson (2018) suggests two tools to diagnosing an excessive dimensionality for a given sample size and develops a method for dimension reduction that is based on replacing the set of inputs and outputs, with their first principal component. Being grounded on the statistical theory, such procedures allow us to robustly assess the efficiency in the execution of Italian public works contracts and tests some hypotheses on its distribution.

ABSTRACT. We present empirical evidence on the relationship between military spending and the expansion of other governmental budgetary heading and tax revenues from the Unification of Italy (1861) up to the end of World War II. Mainly in the years preceding 1922, investments in education and social transfers to families moves together with the defense spending. That is, positive changes in defense implies both an increase in education and in transfers. Moreover, transfers also have a compensatory role during recessive phases. Positive changes in defence do not crowd out the investment in capital spending, while disinvestments in defense are associated with an increase in the investment in capital. The pro-cyclical behavior of the tax revenues is compatible with a debt financing dynamic of many government expenditures. Although our analytic narrative is not universally valid, it can support the persistent centrality of external war in the discontinuous development and expansion of the Italian central State, with some exceptions explained by the historical experience.

ABSTRACT. This paper studies the effect of railway development on local population dynamics in the context of a developing economy. Specifically, we focus on the case of Sardinia between 1861–1911, so that our identification can benefit from the relative spatial isolation of this study area. Furthermore, the economic structure of Sardinia during the study period bears a resemblance with several contemporary developing economies characterized by a predominance of agriculture and natural resource sectors, so that the external validity of our results possibly reaches beyond the single case study in question. On the empirical side, we employ various types of georeferenced historical data that allow us to track the accessibility of each Sardinian municipality over time, as railway lines gradually expanded and new stations opened. On the econometric side, we use instrumental variables to mitigate some of the typical endogeneity concerns that may affect this type of analysis. Our preliminary results suggest that, on average, reducing by 1 hour the time needed to access a municipality from other towns on the island led to an increase of local population by nearly 2%.

ABSTRACT. Reforming the structure of the Value Added Tax (VAT) is an open issue in different countries, mostly for raising revenues and improving the efficiency of the tax system. However, most of the existing analyses do not combine micro- and macro-modelling tools for assessing the welfare and redistributive effects of VAT reforms. Aspects like tax evasion and erosion, moreover, are usually of secondary importance when studying VAT changes. The objective of this paper is twofold. First, we propose an integrated approach, based on the new dynamic multi-sector, multi-household tax computable general equilibrium (CGE) model (ITAXCGE) recently developed at the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance, to study a uniform VAT rate reform in Italy. Our empirical approach has the merit of including new information when evaluating VAT reforms: tax evasion and erosion, irregular labour, different household groups, and a detailed structure of taxation. Second, we simulate the effects of a uniform VAT rate reform on welfare and redistribution, by taking into consideration the consequences of such reform on VAT gap changes. Our results suggest that the equity-efficiency trade-off deriving from the reform under investigation is reduced when including information on tax evasion in the analysis. The policy implications of our study are finally discussed.

ABSTRACT. We use a large and rich administrative dataset on individual tax returns from 2008 to 2015 to analyse the behavioural and distributive effects of a flat tax (FT) reform introduced in 2011 for residential property income in Italy replacing the progressive personal income tax. Using a difference-in-difference identification strategy, and linking a panel of individual tax data with cadastral property records, we address five research questions: (i) does a FT increase the probability of declaring a positive rental income to the tax authorities? (ii) does the FT increase the declared tax base? (iii) is the reduced tax burden shared with the tenant? (iv) does the FT affect the overall tax revenue? (v) who are the gainers of the policy? The estimated intention-to-treat effects highlight that the reduction of tax evasion is limited whereas tax reduction is large, it not shared with tenants and it mostly benefits top-income taxpayers. Overall, top 1\% of property owners reap about 20\% of the overall lost tax revenues.

ABSTRACT. The aim of our analysis is to empirically investigate whether the introduction of the '€80 tax-credit bonus' introduced in 2014 has effectively determined a reduction of labour effort in Italy in the area where the effective marginal tax rate is extremely high. The empirical analysis is based on the longitudinal electronic database of "Personal Income Tax returns" assembled by the Department of Finance of the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance, used for the official tax return statistics published annually. The reform's structure permits us to exploit the difference-in-discontinuities design using the before/after with the discontinuous policy change.

ABSTRACT. The nature of the digital economy puts pressure on traditional tax practices, as it is frequently characterised by high returns from intangibles. One method to address this issue is the introduction of a digital services tax. In this paper, we model the macroeconomic impacts of the digital services tax that was introduced in the UK in 2020. We employ the CORTAX model, which is a computable general equilibrium model elaborated for the member states of the European Union, the UK, the US, and Japan. The model strongly focuses on corporate taxation and distinguishes between domestic firms, multinational headquarters, and multinational subsidiaries. To be able to represent the digital sector, a major extension of the model has been introduced to expand the model from one sector to two, allowing the digital sector to be modelled separately from the rest of the productive economy. The results suggest a negative impact on GDP from the introduction of the tax, but a gain in welfare and consumption for the UK, and positive spillovers for close trading partners.