ABSTRACT. This paper aims to document the drivers of governments’ political responses in the context of the covid-19. We test the hypothesis that populations’ economic preferences - risk, time and pro-social preferences - matter both in terms of the governments’ responsiveness and its stringency. Our empirical analysis combines data on worldwide political responses from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker, individual economic preferences from the Global Preferences Survey, and the 6th and 7th waves of the World Values Surveys. Our final sample consists in 109 countries. We find that trust is an important driver of both aspects of political responses. First, countries with high levels of trust wait longer before implementing their first policy to tackle the epidemic. On the contrary, other preferences (risk, time and altruism) do not relate to responsiveness. Second, all measures of preferences positively relate to the intensity of the political responses in the middle to long run, though at different periods of time. In the short-run, only patience and interpersonal trust are (negatively) related to policies’ stringency.

ABSTRACT. Covid-19 brought to the forefront of the political agenda the trade-off between health and economic activities. Leveraging theoretical and empirical tools from economics, we estimate moral preferences over fatalities and jobs losses due to the pandemic in Italy, the UK and the US. The exercise is based on a choice experiment and allows to characterize those preferences not in a specific situation, but for any point int the space of possible combinations of the two outcomes. This allows to estimate how people respond to the severity of the economic and/or health toll. On average, more than $90\%$ of the weight goes to health in the participants' utility function, and respondents’ stable traits (such as political orientation or risk aversion) influence attitudes more than their personal experiences with the consequences of the pandemic. Most importantly, policy responses look misaligned with estimated preferences. Italy adopted more stringent containment measures, while Italian respondents display a relatively weaker pro-health attitude. We stress-test this result and find it is robust: it does not stem either from a reaction to the policies adopted or from differences in fundamentals, such as labor market conditions and health costs.

ABSTRACT. We study the effect of economic insecurity on electoral outcomes using data on municipal elections in Italy. We implement a difference-in-differences approach that exploits exogenous variation across municipalities in the share of inactive workers due to the economic lockdown introduced by the central government to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic. We show that lockdown-induced economic insecurity positively affected the electoral performance of progressive and left-wing parties, while it negatively affected conservative and far-right parties. Conversely, we nd no effect for the populist Five Star Movement, local independent parties (i.e., Civic Lists), and electoral turnout. We provide evidence that extraordinary economic measures introduced by the central gov ernment to compensate workers for the economic insecurity can explain this shift in partisanship toward the left and the increasing support for pro-EU parties, away from euro-skeptic and populist forces.

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates the effect of air pollution and environmental crimes on health conditions, in Italy, using annual provincial data over the period 2010-2017. The impact of air pollution on health has been the focus of a significant amount of literature, and an increasing body of work is focused on the impact of illegal behavior on environmental quality. Our work aims at establishing a bridge across these two strands of research, by focusing and trying to quantify the indirect impact of environmental crimes on health through the effect that environmental crimes themselves have on air pollution levels. Our very preliminary evidence suggests that the existence of this indirect link is worth additional investigation.

ABSTRACT. Organized crime reinforces its corrupting influence on politics with violent intimidation against politicians. Measures incrementing the costs of corruption, though not increasing formal deterrence, can reduce criminal organizations’ use of violence by rising the barriers to entry the business of influencing politics. Exploiting the data on the mafias’ attacks against politicians in 2010-2019, this paper offers an empirical assessment of the efficacy of the city council dissolution prescribed by the Italian anti-mafia Law 164/1991 in discouraging organized crime violent intimidation. Our difference-in-differences analysis shows that the enforcement of Law 164/1991 reduces local clans’ use of violence against politicians in dissolved municipalities compared to undissolved ones, with substantial spillovers effects on the neighboring undissolved municipalities. We support the exogeneity of this measure to the attacks against politicians by controlling for reverse causality and omitted variable bias, and by implementing an instrumental variable approach.

ABSTRACT. In recent years, Italy experimented an important regulatory evolution in the fight against organized crime, with the introduction of measures both of punishment and prevention. Among the latter, we analyze the impact of the introduction of the White List. These are lists of companies, that satisfy antimafia documentation requirements, set up at each Italian prefectures. We show that the propensity to register in WL increases with the spread of criminality and with the presence of women in the board. Legality is fruitful for firms: we find a positive and significant impact of the WL registration on the firm performance, using different indexes of profitability.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this paper is to assess how mafia infiltration in the legal economy and in local administrative structures influences the performance of public work contracts in Italy. The strong dependence on public resources makes the procurement sector an extremely profitable one for organized crime (OC), especially in the case of the public works and construction sector. We use a dataset comprising data on about 104.000 public work contracts awarded in Italy, from 2007 to 2021, and we assess two relevant dimensions of inefficiency in the execution of public works: cost overruns and time delays. We show that the presence of the mafia in the economy, proxied by the presence of mafia firms that will later be confiscated, is associated with higher cost overruns. This result is in line with previous literature and suggests that mafia infiltration into the legal economy makes the market less efficient and public works more expensive on average. Moreover, when infiltration in the legal economy is accompanied by political infiltration, the ability to penetrate public procurement becomes even more relevant, and this is reflected by an average cost increase of about 13% compared to the initially estimated costs. We do not find significant effects with respect to delays in the execution of works.

ABSTRACT. We analyze the distinct roles of education and intelligence for fertility intentions. Introducing intelligence explicitly will clarify the nature of the causal link between education and fertility, because it will bring us closer to the process that produces acquisition of education. We propose a theoretical framework to investigate the trade-off between educational aspirations, career advancement concerns and parenthood and we explore the conditions under which there is a negative relation between fertility intention and intelligence. We test this prediction in a novel data set related to 839 couples interviewed in Norway and Italy. We document the existence of a delay, or even the sacrifice, of parenthood by more intelligent individuals, particularly among Italian women. The standardized effect is approximately ten per cent for women, i.e. three times larger than that of education and two with respect to income.

ABSTRACT. We employ a human capital model and show that high school dropout might have a mediating role in the intergenerational transmission of criminal behaviour. Empirical models estimated using uniquely suited data from Add Health confirm that paternal crime imposes a double penalty on children: it increases their probability of committing crimes in adulthood both directly and indirectly via school dropout. While an early exposure to high levels of crime increases dropping out, it has no long-term effects on adult crime. Pupils with lower cognitive skills present higher probabilities of adult criminal behaviour and stronger intergenerational effects.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this paper is to analyse the optimal mix between quantity and quality of education by considering a model where altruistic parents choose both the amount and the quality of schooling they want for their children, and where individuals live in two areas that have different socio-economic characteristics. The government is assumed to provide a composite education service which consists of a quantity as well as a quality dimension. First, we analyse the features of an optimal education policy by which the planner aims to maximise social welfare, i.e. a standard optimal taxation framework where school quality and quantity are treated as any two commodities. This standard optimal taxation framework will be the benchmark to study a non-welfarist social welfare set-up which also takes into account positive externalities of education for the all population. In such a set-up, we will study alternative marginal reforms which can be carried on by the public sector to improve social welfare.

ABSTRACT. Although social stratification research has extensively scrutinized the degree of educational inequality over generations, time, and countries, in our view, this literature faces three limitations: 1) The theoretical and normative conceptualization of (in)equality of educational opportunity (IOP) is unsystematic; 2) previous research analyzed single individual circumstances (i.e., parental education, income or occupational class) while disregarding their interactions and cumulative consequences for educational attainment; and 3) it mainly covered developed Western countries. This work aims to overcome these limitations by providing a theoretically informed analysis of unfair inequalities in students’ academic performance drawing from John Roemer’s (1998) normative theory of equal educational opportunity. We draw information from a pooled large dataset comprising all waves of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) (OECD 2021) across 99 countries worldwide from 2000 to 2018. To estimate IOP, we adopt a novel approach using machine learning algorithms —transformation trees and bagging— to assess the relative weight (and interaction) of a more extensive set of ascriptive circumstances than previous research. This approach allows as to avoid underestimating inequality and rank circumstances cross-nationally and over time. We illustrate our formalization and estimation of Roemer’s IOP in education for the case of the Netherlands, where we identify 17 types—groups of individuals characterized by the same circumstances—, and country of origin as the most relevant circumstance in driving unfair educational inequality.

ABSTRACT. Rising costs of disability insurance (DI) programs are putting increased strain on central government budgets across nearly all developed economies. Yet little is known about how well countries target those in the poorest health across countries, or within a country over time. In this paper, we use the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) in the United States during 2004-16 to measure (a) the average health of people aged 50-64 receiving DI, and (b) the effectiveness of the DI safety net in covering those in poor health. Using these two measures, we find that U.S. and Danish DI programs appear successful at targeting benefits to those in the worst health, with France and Belgium less so. We also demonstrate how these measures can be used to evaluate changes over time in DI policies, for example by measuring secular changes in targeting effectiveness following large reductions in DI enrollment (as in the Netherlands and Denmark) or expansions (as in the U.S.).

ABSTRACT. Institutional quality can influence the regulatory framework and the environment in which healthcare providers operate. This, in turn, affects the incentives towards quality and appropriateness of care, and thus patients’ health outcomes. This paper investigates the relation between institutional quality and health outcomes. It reviews the previous literature, and then provides new theoretical insights and empirical evidence on this issue. The theoretical framework suggests that both formal policy levers and, more generally, a better institutional context in which providers take their choices can affect the quality and appropriateness of care provided. The empirical evidence shows that higher institutional quality improves health outcomes in Italian hospitals, as measured by reductions in heart attack, hip fracture, and stroke mortality rates. The paper finally draws key messages for policy and future research in this area.

ABSTRACT. Since 2007, any Italian region exhibiting healthcare budget deficits above a specific total funding threshold has to commit to a Financial Recovery Plan (FRP). Common wisdom suggests that FRPs contributed to containing health spending without significant side effects. By means of a quasi-experimental strategy, we assess the consequences of FRPs on access to healthcare by identifying their impact on patient migration. We find an increase in migration in the range 24-31% when the strictest form of fiscal discipline is implemented. Our empirical analysis documents that migration is affected by the availability of both capital and labour inputs.

ABSTRACT. Healthcare access is affected by the design and functioning of the health system and individuals’ characteristics, such as age, education level, ethnicity, disability status, health literacy, geographical mobility, and economic conditions. Our focus is on the access to appropriate medical treatment for migrants within the Italian universal health care system. We study maternal health interventions measured by cesarean section births, and our aim is twofold. First, we analyze whether non-native women receive significantly different medical treatments when compared to Italian natives. Second, we consider differences among non-natives. Our contribution is to uncover the mechanisms that explain such differences. We find that inappropriateness is negatively and significantly associated with physical distance from the closest hospital. This result is more robust for natives. On the other hand, linguistic distance, cultural distance, institutional distance, and economic distance are significant drivers of the worst outcomes for migrant women. Finally, we introduce the role of the size of the migrant community on health outcomes. We find that a larger community improves health outcomes when the cultural distance from Italian natives is small. On the contrary, inappropriateness worsens when the size of the community is large and the distance from natives is vast, triggering a segregation effect.

ABSTRACT. We argue that tax revenues and political institutions placing constraints on the executive power may reinforce each other over time and so co-evolve in the long run. This may also bring a shift in the composition of revenues, from taxes levied on a narrow base to broadly levied taxes. To test these hypotheses, we use historical cross-country data covering 31 countries for 1800-2012 and panel time series methods allowing for different forms of country-specific heterogeneity and cross-section dependence. The results offer three main findings. First, executive constraints, whether they are judicial or legislative, and tax revenues are cointegrated: there is a long-run relationship between the two. While in the short run they can drift apart, this will be temporary because they tend to co-evolve. Second, evidence of cointegration is strongest for revenues from direct taxes, suggesting that the existence and nature of a long run relationship may be mainly related to the emergence of broad-based taxation. Third, long-run causality runs mostly from executive constraints to taxation. This is most evident for income taxes. Our findings link SDG17 and SDG16, implying that the goal of promoting inclusive and accountable institutions may work in synergy to the one on generating internal resources to finance development goals.

ABSTRACT. Even under an authoritarian rule, the stability of power rests, at least to some extent, on popular consent. In the absence of unfettered media, free elections and an active civil society, reliable information about popular consensus is a scarce good. The chronic inability of non-democratic governments to assess the prevailing sentiment of their citizens hinders the effectiveness of their policy-making, and therefore the stability of their tenures. In order to acquire valuable information about consensus – whereby to secure their power –, ruling elites might find it convenient to loosen censorship controls, and grant independent media some freedom of action. We analyze such a situation within a global game of regime-change, where an authoritarian government can influence popular support via the implementation of a costly policy instrument. Citizens challenge the government via a riot, whose chances to succeed increase with popular discontent, the latter being unknown to all. Each citizen has an informational advantage over the government, for her observed individual support is informative about the unobserved popular sentiment. We show that public, unbiased information about consensus might be ex ante beneficial for the regime. Furthermore, we provide a full characterization of the optimal policy plan of the regime, whose prescriptions are consistent with both the existing theoretical literature and with the empirical evidence. Our results contribute towards a better understanding of the functioning of non-democratic governments, and provide a consistent explanation for heterogeneous forms of limited media freedom, often observed in modern non-democratic regimes and widely documented by the empirical literature.

ABSTRACT. This research provides an empirical test of the predictions of the Political Legislation Cycle theory about decrees using data drawn from the Italian Parliament. The analysis focuses on five different types of decrees promulgated by the Italian parliament: law-decrees (decreti legge), legislative decrees (decreti legislativi), DPR (decrees of the President of the Republic), implementing decrees (decreti attuativi) and independent decrees (decreti indipendenti). The multilevel model estimated broadly confirms the prediction of the theory, namely that decrees tend to be approved at the earlier stages of the legislature; more specifically, this prediction receives stronger support the closer the institutional characteristics of each type of decree are to those of the theoretical variable.

ABSTRACT. What is the relationship between economic and political inequality in the U.S.? On one hand, campaign contributions create opportunities for rich people to exert disproportionate influence on policymakers. On the other hand, public policies that favour the wealthiest groups of society exacerbate existing economic disparities, at the same time giving them a greater relative weight in the donor pool. First, we show that, historically, income inequality at very small geographies in the United States is correlated with individual campaign contributions. Then, we analyse the effect of the 1986 Tax Reform Act, a remarkable tax cut that decreased the marginal tax rates disproportionately for the richest incomes, on individual campaign contributions. We show that this policy decision has caused a spike in contributions from the groups of citizens that benefitted the most from it. We posit that the erosion of tax progressivity has contributed to rise the political clout of wealthy individuals, via campaign donations. We argue that the Tax Reform Act, a landmark policy of the second Reagan administration, has been a crucial step in the spiral between economic inequality and uneven political influence of the last four decades.

ABSTRACT. We propose a novel approach for the measurement of equity in health care which is based on the identification of a money measure of (potential) access opportunities, i.e. the access gap, drawn from the poverty literature. Given the monetization of access opportunities, equity in health care is defined in terms of equality of opportunity among individuals facing different formal and informal barriers to gain access to adequate health treatments. Most importantly, we propose a factor-decomposition of inequality of access opportunities which allows to disentangle the impact of (i) unequal productive efficiency of healthcare providers at the local level, (ii) unequal supply of healthcare providers at the national level, (iii) income and wealth inequality at the local level, and (iv) income and wealth inequality at the national level. An empirical exercise using Italian data shows that our methodology is easily implementable and particularly informative for policy purposes.

ABSTRACT. The analysis of many economic phenomena requires partitioning societies into groups, gathering individuals sharing the same circumstances of birth like gender, birthplace, cohort, ability or parental background, and studying the extent at which these groups are distributed with different intensities across relevant ordered outcomes, such as income, health or cognitive score levels. When the groups are similarly distributed, their members could be seen as having equal chances to achieve any of the attainable outcomes. Otherwise, a form of dissimilarity prevails. We introduce a new, robust dissimilarity criterion for ordering multi-group distributions defined over ordinal outcomes, we characterize it in terms of basic transformations of the data regarded to as unambiguously preserving or reducing dissimilarity and provide an equivalent empirical test based on sequential dominance conditions. An application to Swedish data highlights the usefulness of the criteria to identify the intergenerational distributional consequences of a large education reform which took place in the 1960s.

ABSTRACT. What is greater social mobility? How do people perceive social mobility? To answer the first research question, we propose different and equivalent intuitive definitions based on i) conditional probabilities and covariance, ii) Galton's beta regression iii) Lorenz curve and and social welfare function, and iv) swap (changes) in mobility matrix. To address the second research question, we conduct a questionnaire experiment consisting of ten pair-wise comparisons of alternative scenarios showing different levels of social mobility. We find that in most cases people's perceptions match theoretical predictions except in more complicated scenarios where ``pure'' exchange mobility is combined with structural mobility. Finally, mobility perceptions appear to be driven by the personal mobility experience, as well as by the evaluation of mobility as a sign of equality of opportunity.

ABSTRACT. This article proposes a new approach to estimate the informal economy (IE) by using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). Using a Monte Carlo Simulation and empirical analysis of the Italian IE as an example, we provide general conclusions on the reliability and limitations of the SEM approach to estimate the IE. Practical guidelines on how to apply this method and the way to deal with the most problematic issues are provided. We conclude that the SEM approach may be effectively used, as a complementary method to the National Accounting Approach, to adjust official statistics for the presence of the IE.

ABSTRACT. This paper aims to shed lights on the relationship between intergenerational mobility and tax morale. We show that higher intergenerational mobility increases tax morale among European countries. This linkage is stronger and significant in countries where there is a commitment of the Government in guaranteeing more opportunities to citizens regardless of their familiar starting conditions (more defamiliarized countries). We further show that the positive linkage between intergenerational mobility and tax morale is significant only for individuals claiming for independence from their family context (i.e., those having less family ties). The results are quite robust across different estimation strategies, including an instrumental-variables methodology. This evidence remarks the importance to foster intergenerational mobility to build a more tax-compliant society.

ABSTRACT. Intra-household inequality explains up to 50 percent of the cross-sectional variation in child human capital in the developing world. I study the role played by parents’ educational investment to explain this inequality and its determinants. To mitigate the identification problem posed by observational data, I design a lab-in-the-field experiment with poor par- ents in India. I develop new theory-driven survey measures based on hypothetical scenarios that allow me to separately identify parental beliefs about the human capital production function and their preferences for inequality in children’s outcomes, as well as study the role of household resources. I find that parents are driven by efficiency considerations rather than inequality concerns over children’s final outcomes. Because they perceive investments and baseline ability to be complements in the production function, they invest more in higher-achieving children. Resources are important, as constrained parents select more unequal allocations. I then show that primitive parameters identified in the experiment are predictive of actual investment behaviour. The results indicate that families act as a reinforcing agent, magnifying ability-based educational inequalities between children.

ABSTRACT. We set up a model in which the residents of a `big home country' are tempted to move to a `small foreign country' that levies lower income taxes, tax cheating is feasible in the home but not in the foreign country, and tax setting is the result of Cournot-Nash competition between revenue maximizing governments. The main result concerns how tax setting is affected by the factors influencing tax cheating and taxpayers' mobility. Ceteris paribus, tax competition is fiercer, and hence taxation in both countries is lower, when taxpayers' heterogeneity is primarily due to differing opportunities for tax cheating at home and change of residence, than when it is primarily due to differing moral attitudes towards tax cheating and tax-induced mobility.

ABSTRACT. European countries are characterised by heterogeneous social contexts related both to structural socio-cultural framework and to social policies models. In general, Northern European countries present a lower social stratification resulting from lower income inequality, smaller gender gap and greater equal opportunities for health and other social outcomes. This is due to generous, inclusive and universal income and services policies, to a well-performing labour market and to a more equitable role of women within the family. A greater social stratification is typical of continental and Mediterranean European countries, where, especially in Southern Europe, many social benefits are related to the working status and are asymmetrically distributed among workers. However, social stratification is a multidimensional issue that amplifies the inequalities of resources and opportunities among individuals, facilitates an unfair exposure to social risks, and contributes to the verticalization of power relations. To counter this deterministic trend, EU national governments and the EU itself are called to restore more horizontal relations among individuals, by removing through the implementation of effective social protection systems, the socioeconomic obstacles to people’s full participation in the political, economic, and social life. Designing and implementing efficient and effective social protection systems is a challenging task, and policy makers must base their decisions on the availability of updated and exhaustive analyses. Specifically, social protection systems are complex structures, thus the measurement of their performance requires the use of composite indices. Recent research carried out on social protection systems in the EU (Antonelli and De Bonis, 2019) has designed a synthetic indicator - the Social Protection Performance Index (SPPI) - to measure the effectiveness of social protection systems. The SPPI is based on a set of elementary indicators associated with seven dimensions of welfare spending. The SPPI has been modified by Antonelli and Salustri (2019) to interpret results along four dimensions, and several scoring rules have been proposed to test the robustness of the scores initially computed. Lying on these premises, the scope of this research is to improve and expand the dataset used in previous analyses and compute the scores of the SPPI in a longitudinal framework. Specifically, the new longitudinal dataset is built using OECD and EUROSTAT data to monitor the performances of 22 European protection systems in the decade after the outbreak of the Great Recession in 2007. The monitoring exercise involves four dimensions (wellbeing, inclusion, poverty, and social security). The SPPI is computed by measuring both levels and ranks associated to the 11 elementary indexes considered in the analysis. Data are normalized using the Minmax criteria applied to the whole panel, and, when, appropriate, a truncated scoring function is used to facilitate the interpretation of the scores obtained. Results allow to monitor the longitudinal evolution of the SSPI across 22 countries and 11 years, highlighting the structural heterogeneity that characterizes the EU countries, and how the European social protection systems reacted to the effects of the Great Recession. Furthermore, the scores computed for the SPPI are regressed over a set of structural variables (population, territory, public deficit and debt, GDP…) to test whether the performances of the European protection systems depend on territorial and economic factors rather than on political and social choices. The interpretation of the results achieved leads to the conclusion that the heterogeneity in the performances of the European social protection systems has both a horizontal and a vertical dimension, that is, lower performances may be also associated to lower capacity of representing national interests at European level. If not corrected through effective policies at European level, the dual nature of the observed social imbalances may lead to reinforcing social stratification rather than levelling the playing field, and that, in turn, may contribute to consolidate the verticalization of power relations among European countries, rather than fostering some degree of convergence. The analysis of the evidence built allows to evaluate whether the EU reaction to the outbreak of the Great Recession has led to a convergence or a divergence in the performances of the European social protection systems.

ABSTRACT. “Quota 100” è stata introdotta dall’articolo 14 del DL 4/2019. Questo canale, sperimentale e aggiuntivo rispetto a quelli ordinari di vecchiaia e anticipato, permette il pensionamento a tutti i lavoratori iscritti alle gestioni dell’INPS che perfezionano nel triennio 2019-2021 il requisito congiunto di almeno 62 anni di età e 38 di anzianità contributiva. Soddisfatto il requisito, l’uscita con “Quota 100” può avvenire anche successivamente. A tre anni dal suo avvio, INPS e UPB tracciano un bilancio su “Quota 100” sulla base dei dati dei contribuenti alle gestioni INPS e delle informazioni rilevate dalla procedura di monitoraggio dei pensionamenti prevista dell’art. 28 del DL 4/2019.

Al 31 dicembre 2021 le domande accolte sono poco meno di 380 mila, per più di due terzi di uomini. Quasi l’81 per cento è transitato in “Quota 100” dal lavoro (circa 178 mila dal privato e circa 129 mila dal pubblico), poco meno del 9 per cento da “silente”, poco più dell’8 per cento da percettore di prestazioni di sostegno al reddito, poco più del 2 per cento da prosecutori volontari di contribuzione. La gestione di liquidazione è stata da lavoro dipendente privato per quasi la metà dei casi, da lavoro dipendente pubblico per poco più del 30 per cento, da lavoratore autonomo per circa il 20 per cento. Se in valori assoluti le pensioni con “Quota 100” sono state più concentrate al Nord, meno al Mezzogiorno e ancor meno al Centro, quando espresse in percentuale o della base occupazionale o del flusso medio delle uscite per pensione anticipata esse mostrano le incidenze maggiori al Mezzogiorno e quelle più basse al Nord, con il Centro in posizione intermedia. Queste differenze territoriali si ridimensionano significativamente in termini di take-up (pensionati effettivi in percentuale dei complessivi aventi diritto), sino a scomparire quasi del tutto se si isola l’effetto della residenza del pensionato da quello delle altre caratteristiche individuali rilevanti.

A ricorrere a “Quota 100” sono soprattutto i decili di reddito medi e medio-alti. Si registra anche la prevalenza a lasciare il lavoro alla prima decorrenza utile, con almeno uno dei requisiti di età e anzianità al livello minimo. Mediamente l’anticipo rispetto al più vicino dei requisiti ordinari è di 2,3 anni. L’anticipo incide in maniera significativa sul valore dell’assegno: mediamente lo riduce del 4,5 per cento per anno di anticipo per i lavoratori autonomi, del 3,8 per cento per i dipendenti privati e del 5,2 per cento per i dipendenti pubblici. L’età media alla decorrenza si attesta poco al di sopra di 63 anni, mentre l’anzianità media è di 39,6 anni.

Per i lavoratori che hanno maturato il diritto a “Quota 100” nel 2019 il take-up complessivo a fine 2021 è del 49 per cento, mentre per i lavoratori che hanno maturato il diritto a “Quota 100” nel 2020 il take-up complessivo a fine 2021 è del 47 per cento.

Tra le caratteristiche soggettive statisticamente più significative c’è l’anzianità contributiva, che aumenta la probabilità di ricorrere a “Quota 100” grazie all’effetto positivo sul valore delle pensioni. I prosecutori volontari, i disoccupati e i “silenti” hanno probabilità significativamente più alte di usare “Quota 100” rispetto agli attivi. Rispetto ai dipendenti privati, gli autonomi hanno probabilità di usare “Quota 100” significativamente inferiori, mentre i dipendenti pubblici si collocano nel mezzo con ampia differenze tra comparti. La probabilità di usare “Quota 100” aumenta col reddito (eccezion fatta per il decile più elevato). Infine, valutato assieme alle altre caratteristiche, il genere resta significativo ma con un impatto modesto in termini di probabilità, più alta per gli uomini.

Sulla base di queste evidenze, si stima che la spesa effettiva, di consuntivo sino al 2021 e proiettata dal 2022 al 2025, potrà attestarsi a circa 23,2 miliardi. Nell’arco di circa di sette anni, una minore spesa di 10,3 miliardi sui 33,5 stanziati dal DL 4/2019 appare significativa (-30,7 per cento). Tuttavia, se considerata rispetto allo stanziamento aggiornato da NADEF 2019 e LB 2020, la minore spesa ammonterebbe a 5,8 miliardi (-19,9 per cento). Si sottolineano anche due aspetti: da un lato, in assenza di dati sui take-up le valutazioni iniziali erano ispirate a chiara prudenza e, dall’altro, non si può escludere che tra il 2022 e il 2025 i take-up si posizionino su livelli un po’ più elevati di quelli osservati tra il 2019 e il 2021 per le platee che hanno acquisito il diritto a “Quota 100” nel 2019 e nel 2020.

Con i necessari adattamenti, i take-up rate osservati per “Quota 100” potranno essere utili per valutare gli impatti di finanza pubblica di eventuali nuove riforme in ambito pensionistico, a cominciare dalle proposte in discussione per risolvere in maniera strutturale il nodo della flessibilità in uscita.

JEL Classification: H75, H55, I38, J14

Keywords: Quota 100, Quota 102, Pensioni, Spesa pensionistica, Flessibilità nel pensionamento, Riforme pensionistiche

ABSTRACT. The political returns to providing cash transfers have been well documented. However, redistribution through the tax and transfer system, while direct, is not the only means by which governments seek to affect the income distribution: regulation of private market transactions may have a similar, if indirect, effect. Wage floors, in particular, are implemented with the goal of redistributing income to low-wage workers. In the United States, polls consistently indicate minimum wage increases are broadly popular, and, also clearly associated with the Democratic party. This paper provides the first test of whether large minimum wage increases actually yield electoral gains for Democrats. I find no evidence this is the case using an event study design and sub-national variation in minimum wages from the early 1990s to recent years. This is true for both federal and state Democrats. Various alternative explanations for the finding are explored and dispelled while newly collected survey evidence supports a salience mechanism as voters are found to attend much more to a direct cash transfer from the government than an equivalently-valued minimum wage increase. In other words, it's not only getting a check in people's hands that matters for political credit, but, also, signing it.