ABSTRACT. Is self-regulation of social media effective in moderating online content? Or does it shift abusive posts to darker corners of the internet? This paper addresses these questions analyzing the effect of social media regulation from a cross-platform perspective. I exploit an episode of enlargement of Twitter’s regulation against racist hate speech and I investigate whether regulation is effective in curbing this harmful content or whether it shifts abusive content to unregulated platforms. I exploit synthetic difference-in-differences to assess the effects of the new Twitter’s policy, and I construct text classifiers using supervised methods from natural language processing to predict whether a post can be considered targeted hate speech. I find that racist content decrease in percentage both in Twitter and in Parler, but that users that have accounts in both platform increase their racist posts on Parler after Twitter’s policy. Finally, I exploit word embedding to see if the language used toward minorities changed after the regulation, and I find that terms related to some minorities became more offensive in Parler after Twitter’s policy. Overall, my results show a possible substitution effect between platforms, with more abusive content that shifts from regulated to less regulated social media platforms.

ABSTRACT. This paper empirically verifies whether education, an indicator of voters’ ability to process information, constrains political budget cycles (PBC), a measure of inefficiency in the agency relationship between voters and their representatives. Over information and the spread of fake news question the previous results of conditional PBC literature on information as a factor improving such relationship. We proxy the quality of education by PISA scores and the its diffusion by the percentage of students completing secondary and tertiary education. On a sample of 46 countries over the period 2000-2019, the estimates show that higher levels of education reduce the magnitude of PBC. Adding standard proxies for information (media and internet penetration) does not affect the results, showing that education matters more than information. The analysis also shows that higher degrees of democracy reduce the education levels needed to control PBC. All the other findings of the literature appear confirmed.

ABSTRACT. We investigate the behavioral response of workers to the income tax schedule, taking into account frictions in the formal labor market, the informal labor market, and the effect of publicly provided goods. We bring our theoretical analysis to Brazilian matched employer-employee administrative data reported by the firms with tax rate variation at the federal level to test formal wage earners heterogenous reported wages. We also compare our result with the Brazilian survey-PNAD which contains informal and self-employed individuals. Although we show that bunching is monotonically related to the size of the exemption kink point of the Brazilian tax schedule, there is not a statistically significant evidence of bunching at the exemption level for a typical wage earner. However, we do find a significant but small (elasticity equals to 0.001) behavioral response in sectors with ease access to informal sector (retail/commerce) and with low search costs (white-collar). We do not find behavioral differences for taxpayers in states with abundant publicly provided services.

ABSTRACT. This work examines whether a tax cut can lead to an increase in tax compliance. To this aim, we investigate the local waste sector in Emilia-Romagna municipalities. To achieve identification, we exploit a natural experiment set by a regional law that, starting from January 2016, grant a reduction in the waste tax rate only for residents of municipalities with efficient waste collection (i.e. under an exogenous threshold established by the regional policy-maker). Using a Difference-in-Discontinuities and staggered Difference-in-Differences strategies, we estimate the impact of tax rate reduction on tax compliance. Robustness checks are implemented by looking at the impact of the waste tax benefit on other taxes locally managed (real estate tax) and using as control group municipalities not eligible for tax reduction located in Emilia-Romagna’s neighbours. Results show very heterogenous effects among the treated units: after 2016 the share of tax evasion recorded in municipalities affected by the tax cut reduced, in comparison with similar municipalities not exposed to the tax benefit, only for those municipalities with a higher share of pre-reform waste tax evasion. Conversely, subsidized municipalities characterized by a higher pre-reform compli- ance level do not gain any evasion reduction.

ABSTRACT. We designed a Survey Experiment (SE) to study the attitudes of the Italians towards wealth, income and consumptions taxes. In particular, we interviewed a sample of 2,400 subjects drawn from a larger representative pool of 120,000 individuals. Beside collecting information about individuals’ values and beliefs, the survey also gathered information about (i) the preferred tax base, (ii) the attitudes towards replacing all the taxes with a unique tax, possibly on wealth, (iii) the views in regard to proposals to increase public expenditure by resorting to taxes of various kind and in different scenarios. We find that wealth taxes are definitely preferred to consumption taxes and that this preference is at par with income taxation. Wealth taxes are justified by the fact that they reflect one’s ability to pay. Opposition emerges when it is feared that wealth taxes end up increasing tax pressure and when the value of the main residence is included in the tax base. In general, support for the wealth tax weakens when self-assessed economic status improves and the belief in well-deserved success strengthens. Political inclinations play a minor role. Proposals to involve the EU authorities into the decision processes regarding taxation and expenditure receive only lukewarm responses.

ABSTRACT. Freedom of Information (FOI) laws have been introduced in a wide number of countries and have a paramount importance in fostering public administrations transparency. Testing whether they are effectively applied is crucial to understand their effectiveness. This paper presents the results of a field experiment performed in Italy, a late FOI adopter, where a FOI request was sent to the 307 municipalities with more than 30k inhabitants. The experimental design exploits marginal wording variation in the requests to test whether municipalities discriminate between common citizens and high-profile requesters. The experimental evidence suggests that the majority of Italian municipalities replies to FOI requests. The results show two opposite types of discretionary bias, as northern municipalities tend to favour high-profile requesters while southern municipalities tend to respond them with a higher degree of attrition. The study investigates the determinants of this difference.

ABSTRACT. This paper, by means of panel data analysis on developing countries data, manages to capture two different role that private parties might play in public-private partnerships, respectively in managing projects (governance types) and financing them (private share of the investment), in the presence of public partners (local and central governments) characterized by different institutional quality, controlling for investment size and physical assets involved, and other economic determinants. Our results suggest that high control of corruption and good regulatory quality are the two dimensions of public governance that influence PPP governance structure and financing. That is, a better country system in controlling corruption incentivizes the private involvement in the management of infrastructures while a better regulation incentivizes the presence of private capitals. The results illustrate well the similarities and the differences that those roles might have in PPPs depending on the size and specificity of the projects. The greater the size of the project the smaller the role of private investors in the project governance and, even more strikingly, their capital involvement.

ABSTRACT. The Political Legislation Cycles (henceforth, PLC) theory predicts peaks of legislative production before elections, as incumbents adopt vote-maximizing strategies to secure reelection. Like for budget cycles, the presence of legislative cycles can be interpreted as quantitative evidence of a dynamic inefficiency in the agency relationship between voters and politicians. This paper presents the first panel test of PLC theory, to identify the institutional features that contribute to this inefficiency. The test exploits a brand-new dataset including the legislative activity of 19 countries, mainly from 1975 to the 2010s. The estimates show that the total number of laws decreases by 40% at the beginning of a new legislature and increases roughly by the same amount near its end, when elections are held at the expected time. The magnitude of this cycle increases by two times in PR electoral systems compared to majoritarian ones, by 45% in parliamentary governments compared to presidential ones and by 35% in countries with a degree of decentralization higher than the average. Finally, the level of democracy affects the PLC in a nonlinear way.

ABSTRACT. The application of crowdfunding to philanthropy has not yet been studied extensively. In this paper, we focus on the sequential nature of giving on crowdfunding platforms. On the one hand, this feature exacerbates late donors' incentives to free-ride on early donors' contributions. On the other hand, sequential giving provides an opportunity for leadership-giving by early donors. Economic theory states that lead donors can signal their information about the quality of the public good to downstream donors leading to a positive response to early donations by downstream donors. Moreover, late donors' conditional cooperation due to moral obligation, reciprocity, social pressure, social norm-compliance, inequality aversion, or self-image concerns can also induce a similar positive response. To understand the impact of leadership and donor behavior in the context of crowdfunding, we use data from a prominent crowdfunding platform to estimate early donations' effect on later donations to verify which one of these forces is the main driver of donor behavior in crowdfunding platforms. Our findings mainly support the dominance of free-riding.

ABSTRACT. We estimate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on hidden drop-out, a new indicator of educational failure based on the probability of achieving the minimum level of skills considered to be adequate for students’ getting the high school diploma (grade 13). To this purpose, we exploit the exogenous variation induced by the pandemic by comparing two cohorts of students (one affected and the other unaffected), within the same school, and by controlling for several pre-determined students’ characteristics, including prior achievement. We find that hidden drop-out increases by 8.6 percentage points; the effect is stronger for students with lower levels of prior achievement, from poorer families, and for those emotionally disrupted during assessments.

ABSTRACT. A significant body of literature estimates the chances of obtaining a college degree using logistic models set in an arbitrary timeframe, where a graduation indicator is checked at a conventional point in time and associated with a set of covariates measured at some date. Survival models emerged gradually as a useful alternative for being able to represent the temporal dimension of progress towards graduation, including differential effects of predictors over time. In this paper, we exploit a unique dataset and the nature of discrete-time survival models as combinations of logistic regressions run at different times to illustrate how a logistic model of graduation is affected by the arbitrary choice of a timeframe and how this may impact the outcomes of educational policies in terms of results and revenue. At the same time, though, we illustrate how separately running and analyzing all the distinct logistic regressions provides insights that are unlikely to come from a survival model.

ABSTRACT. The literature based on targeted pre-primary education has highlighted the potential beneficial role of early education on earnings and employment opportunities, both in terms of rising average outcomes and reducing inequalities related with the background of origin. This paper contributes by estimating the long-term effects of preschool education in Italy. We rely on the exogenous variations across places and cohorts in preschool supply followed the institution of Scuola Materna in 1968. We find, on average small and non significant long-term effect on education and earnings. However, the heterogeneous analysis by parental education background shows that children from advantaged family background significantly benefit from preschool expansion in terms of both education and labor market outcomes.

ABSTRACT. This paper contributes to the literature on the gender gap in STEM by analyzing the channels of influence of students’ college field enrollment. By exploiting a survey involving 15,873 students at the time of matriculation at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia between 2016 and 2020, and applying a strategy of differences to differences, we deepen the heterogeneity related to students' different backgrounds. Within the framework of a general robust evidence suggesting a significant role in reducing gender differentials of students’ networks with other students already enrolled at the university, and an opposite role of high school teachers, the patterns inspiring students' choices show strong heterogeneity particularly in the dimension concerning the characteristics of family backgrounds.

ABSTRACT. Developed countries devolve large part of their public spending on goods and services. However, when it comes to building and restoring the country's infrastructure, the attention of politicians and analysts is very strong, given the impact that these works could have on the national economy, both in the short and long period. The aim of this paper is to investigate how dimensions impact on public procurement efficiencies under three different point of view: public contracts, contracting authorities, winning firms. To do this we employ a panel dataset consisting of about 100,000 public works contracts awarded in Italy from 2007 to 2021 at municipal level to conduct a study in relation to two different measures of inefficiency in the execution of public works: cost overruns and time-delay. Our results confirm that dimensions matters. In detail, we find larger works tend to exhibit higher levels of inefficiency, as evidenced by increased cost overruns and execution time delays. On the other hand, however, both cost overruns and time delays decrease when assigned by more experienced contracting authorities, or to larger firms. Our results align with the legislative trend towards enhancing the qualification of contracting authorities, and highlight the importance of project size in determining inefficiencies.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, we exploit a discontinuity in anti-mafia screening procedures to show that local public buyers may facilitate the misappropriation of resources by organized crime, by manipulating the value of contracts (public works and services). We use data on public procurement contracts issued by Italian municipalities, covering the period between 2007 and 2021. Using bunching estimators we uncover manipulation of the value of contracts just below the anti-mafia screening threshold of €150,000, with bunching behavior being sharper in public works and in provinces with higher mafia intensity. We also show that public procurement contracts awarded just below the threshold display worse performance indicators in terms of cost overruns and renegotiations, and tend to be awarded to firms that display financial metrics coherent with the hypotheses of mafia infiltration.

ABSTRACT. Public infrastructure procurement is crucial as a prerequisite for public and private investments and for economic and social capital growth. However, low performance in execution severely hinders infrastructure provision and benefits delivery. One of the most sensitive phases in public infrastructure procurement is the design because of the strategic relationship that it potentially creates between procurers and contractors in the execution stage, affecting the costs and the duration of the contract. In this paper, using recent developments in non-parametric frontiers and propensity score matching, we evaluate the performance in the execution of public works in Italy. The analysis provides robust evidence of significant improvement of performance where procurers opt for design and build contracts, which lead to lower transaction costs, allowing contractors to better accommodate the project in the execution. Our findings bear considerable policy implications.

ABSTRACT. This paper studies whether and how much procurement managers matter for effective procurement outcomes. We rely on detailed data on Italian procurement for public works, and on the identity of public officials responsible for their tendering and execution. Our analysis shows that, ceteris paribus and even within the same procuring agency, their identity matters for effective procurement. Furthermore, for cleaner identification we exploit institutional changes that raised the stringency of eligibility criteria for such role as a lever of public officials’ quality and study how it affects procurement outcomes. In particular, we measure procurement success by the duration of the administrative procedures needed to award the tender and the time to complete it. We find that procurement managers’ quality positively relates to the speed of awarding and of completing the planned public works

ABSTRACT. The paper suggests a possible strategy to reform energy excise duties to address the issue of climate change, following the provisions of the proposed revision of the Energy Taxation Directive. The analysis focuses on three products in particular: petrol and diesel used as motor fuels and household electricity consumption. The logic behind the environmental reform follows the double dividend theory. Indeed, using a micro-simulation model based on data from the Household Budget Survey provided by the Italian National Statistics Institute, a first reform scenario is simulated for the values of the excise duties mentioned. However, the focus of the analysis is not on the environmental impact of the reform. In fact, the additional revenue generated by the environmental reform will be used to implement two other reforms independently. The first concerns VAT, the main indirect tax in Italy; the second concerns excise duties themselves. The idea behind these reforms is to demonstrate that more robust redistributive effects can be achieved by using public expenditure and, in particular, a cash transfer, to limit the regressive effect of the environmental reform and to achieve comprehensive tax reform, not limited to a single instrument.

ABSTRACT. This study aims to examine the factors that affect individuals' perceptions of the affordability of residential energy across European union countries. Using data from the European Social Survey (ESS) we conducted an econometric analysis to investigate the relationships between energy affordability perception and risk and trust attitudes. The results indicate that trust, particularly trust in politicians, is a significant factor in shaping individuals' perceptions of energy affordability. The impact of risk attitudes is largely mediated by social attitudes and socio-economic characteristics. Overall, this study suggests that trust may be an important factor influencing household energy consumption.

ABSTRACT. What is the relationship between the distributions of income, wealth, and CO2 emissions across the population in Italy? We study the association between income, wealth, and types of CO2 emissions across households in Italy. We construct a novel database for this purpose. We find that CO2 emissions are highly concentrated at the top of the consumption, income, and wealth distribution. We also distinguish consumption-based and investment-based CO2 emissions and found that emission via investment are increasingly more concentrated at the top of the wealth distribution and increasingly less at the top of the income distribution. We also find that CO2 emissions have decreased across the population between 2008 and have done more so at the top of the CO2 emissions distribution only before the financial crisis.

ABSTRACT. We investigate the causal impact of exposure to air pollution on premature mortality in Southern European cities over the period 2010-2018. We exploit variation in rainfall shocks to instrument for non-random PM2.5 pollution exposure. Results show that 1 unit increase in PM2.5 implies an increase in the mortality rate under 65 and in the infant mortality rate of 1.508 and 0.112, corresponding to 5.4% and 4.7% of their average values. Stronger effects are found on the under-65 mortality rate in Spain and on the infant mortality rate in Italy, in cities with PM 2.5 levels above the median or below the median of the distribution of the rate of individuals at risk of poverty within the country.

ABSTRACT. Brain drain is a growing concern for many countries experiencing large emigration rates of their highly educated citizens. While several European countries have designed preferential tax schemes to attract high-skilled individuals, there is limited empirical evidence on the effectiveness of fiscal incentives in a context of brain drain, and on migration responses beyond top earners. In this paper we investigate the effects of the Italian 2010 tax scheme “Controesodo”, which granted a generous income tax exemption to young high-skilled expatriates who relocate to Italy. Eligibility requires a college degree as well as being born in 1969 or later, which creates suitable quasi-experimental conditions to identify the effect of tax incentives. Using a Triple Difference design and administrative data on return migration, we find that eligible individuals are 27% more likely to move back to Italy post-reform. Additionally, using social security data from the main origin country of Italian returnees (Germany), we uncover significant effects throughout the wage distribution, suggesting that mobility in response to tax incentives is a broad phenomenon not limited to top earners. A cost-benefit analysis reveals that the direct fiscal impact of the reform – a lower bound of the total effect in the presence of human capital externalities – is marginally positive, by virtue of the tax scheme targeting young high-skilled individuals.

ABSTRACT. Job insecurity has wide-ranging effects beyond the labour market. Using the 2012 Fornero reform in Italy as a natural experiment and employing difference-in-differences regressions with a firm-size discontinuity, we analyse individual-level data from the Italian Survey on Household Income and Wealth and Longitudinal Labour Force Survey. Our findings reveal that greater job insecurity leads to increased savings. Through a series of tests, we establish that this rise in savings is driven by precautionary motives. Our results indicate an elasticity of savings to employment risk of 9% and a risk aversion level of three. Moreover, we observe that workers facing greater job insecurity protect themselves by reducing exposure to financial risks.

ABSTRACT. Job polarisation refers to the increase of employment in top and bottom-paid occupations at the expense of middle-paid jobs. Despite that the impact of technology on employment may be quite different for men and women, given the potential segregation of some jobs, the literature has equally treated male and female workers. To explore this possibility, this paper studies gender-specific changes in occupations. Surprisingly, employment polarisation is found for women, but not for men. The Routine Bias Technological Change (RBTC) hypothesis is able to explain the decrease of employment in the middle part of the wage distribution, being this effect higher for male than for female workers. However, the RBTC does not account for the changes observed at the tails of the distribution for women. Structural change based on structural transformation or marketization does. When better opportunities for women exist in the market, education becomes more attractive which increases the number of females willing to study. This enhances the participation of women in the labour market and, consequently, reduces their work at home. In addition, consumption spillovers that make women in top-paid occupations to consume more services exist.

ABSTRACT. The wide heterogeneity in employers’ layoff risks is a primary determinant of the systematic asymmetry between who uses and who finances the unemployment insurance system. Low-risk employers rarely layoff their workers but regularly pay unemployment taxes, and thus subsidize high-risk employers, who systematically lay off workers but only pay a portion of the cost of the benefits they generate in unemployment taxes. This paper shows, theoretically and empirically, that unemployment insurance subsidies to high-risk employers allow them to become larger than in the no-subsidy case. Using data covering the universe of employers in South Carolina and a differences-in-differences strategy around a reform of the state’s unemployment insurance financing rules, I show that a 1 percent increase in employers’ taxes-to-benefits gap leads to a 0.11% relative increase in the number of employees hired by high-risk employers. This elasticity of labor reallocation with respect to unemployment insurance subsidies is a sufficient statistic for the optimal level of unemployment benefits. A higher share of workers hired by high-risk employers entail a greater amount of unemployment benefits to finance with general taxation. Taking the inefficiency of reallocation into account reduces the optimal level of unemployment benefits by (TBD).

ABSTRACT. 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. We analyse both intra- 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. We also explore whether the flows are directed towards health providers high-specialized in the delivery of cancer-specific treatments, looking at their structural characteristics and at the volume of clinical activities, possibly associated with waiting lists. The study suggests ways to reallocate public expenditure in such a way as to reduce inter-regional flows of patients, with positive effects on disparities in access to care.

ABSTRACT. According to the reform of differentiated autonomy proposed in Italy, the State should increase the devolution of powers to local governments. This paper investigates whether local governments are more efficient than central government in the management of public functions in Italy. The empirical analysis considers a large sample of 415,378 public projects managed by different levels of government and uses project duration as a proxy of (in)efficiency. The results show that local governments are more efficient in the management of some public functions but central government is more efficient in other important functions, like education. This heterogeneity characterizes all geographic areas of the country. Therefore, the empirical evidence suggests that differentiated autonomy would not lead to a generalized improvement in the management of public services.

ABSTRACT. We study whether hospitals that exhibit higher quality of care deliver more effective and efficient care by focusing on caesarean section rates, which are a commonly used indicator to track opportunistic behaviour from healthcare providers. We use monthly aggregate data for NHS Hospital Trusts in England and focus on two measures of hospital quality, namely emergency readmission rates and hospital-acquired infection rates. To investigate the link between hospital quality and caesarean section rates we exploit panel regression models, and we explore whether there is a differential impact between elective and emergency caesarean sections. We find that higher quality hospitals have lower elective caesarean section rates, and that hospital quality plays a role especially in more deprived areas.

ABSTRACT. Outcome-based measures, such as mortality and readmission rates, are often interpreted as good indicators of the unobservable hospital quality and, thus, increasingly adopted as a basis for providing financial incentives to hospitals. In this paper, preliminarily we examine risk-adjusted mortality and readmission rates for three specific medical procedures (CHF, COPD, STROKE) in Italian hospitals and, in contrast to the conventional wisdom, we show that the two outcome measures tell two completely different stories in terms of hospitals’ performance. Moving from this evidence, we present a theoretical model of hospitals’ behaviour where patients differ in their idiosyncratic risk and, importantly, we consider explicitly the generating process of standard outcome-based indicators. We find that, when adjustment for the idiosyncratic risk is not fully appropriately made, readmission rates are worse indicators of hospital quality than mortality rates, and their use in performance programmes might penalize the best hospitals. Moreover, we find that higher is the probability of mortality for the specific medical intervention, lower is the reliability of readmission rates as indicators of quality. Therefore, our results emphasize that the use of readmission rates as a basis for performance evaluation programs should be considered with caution.

ABSTRACT. We contribute to the literature on the evaluation of cohesion policy from a novel perspective. We first employ a fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design to assess the effects of the policy on a broad set of variables that is consistent with the Cohesion Policy’s multidimensional development objectives and sustainable development goals and we explore how regional characteristics related to absorptive capacity impact on the effect of the funds on development outcomes. We then employ machine learning algorithms to predict the regions at higher risk of limited absorptive capacity, measured in terms of payments and decommitments and identify the factors that have the most significant impact on absorptive capacity. Our preliminary results do not yield a conclusive response on the effectiveness of the EU regional policies. However, we find that the policy is effective in boosting economic and social growth among regions similar in terms of absorptive capacity, i.e. institutional quality and human capital levels.

ABSTRACT. The use of machine learning algorithms in social sciences, particularly economics, is becoming increasingly popular due to the growing availability of data and cost-effective computational power. These algorithms have several advantages over traditional econometric models, such as superior out-of-sample prediction capabilities and the ability to account for uncertainty in the data-generating process. However, the use of machine learning algorithms is not without limitations. This paper investigates the implications of using data-driven algorithms to measure inequality of opportunity. We focus in particular on a popular algorithm, conditional inference regression trees. Trees partition the population into social groups, types, by estimating a sequence of statistical tests. Inequality of opportunity is then measured as between-type inequality. We show the existence of a tight link between the two fundamental principles of the theory of equal opportunity - the principles of compensation and reward - and the concepts of power and confidence levels in hypothesis testing. While the level of confidence of the tests has been carefully considered in this type of estimation the equally relevant level of power has been ignored. We show that estimates based on low power distort downward measures of inequality of opportunity and we propose a pragmatic approach to assess the severity of the problem in empirical analysis. We continue with highlighting some further limitations of using conditional inference regression tree. In particular, we highlight how the binary splitting procedure used to grow trees may fail to identify a high fraction of relevant types and identifies instead non-salient types. Such errors would result again in biases of opposite sign. To overcome both issues we propose to modify the algorithm that grows conditional inference regression trees reducing the risk of biases. To show the practical relevance of our proposal, we analyse inequality of income opportunities in the population of Italian PhDs using the 2018 wave of the “Survey on university doctorate holders’ vocational integration”, by the Italian National Institute of Statistics.

ABSTRACT. More than two decades of sustained economic growth across most of South Asia brought significant poverty reduction, yet inclusive social progress has remained elusive. We quantify the portion of outcome inequality which can be unambiguously attributed to predetermined circumstances in the South Asia Region (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka) focusing on two different dimensions of individual well-being: consumption and education. Moreover, we investigate the role played by the different circumstances in determining the extent of inequality of opportunity (IOp) in the different countries. Documenting substantial improvements in basic educational opportunities across birth cohorts and for large parts of the region, patterns for IOp in consumption are less homogeneous. Providing a growth incidence assessment of across opportunity groups, we document improvements in education attainment to be strongly progressive in most countries and economic growth in terms of consumption to be less progressive. Given the common data restriction of absent direct parental background data, we examine the potential contribution of coresident data in IOp estimation by leveraging a limited set of representative surveys.

ABSTRACT. Early childhood non-cognitive development is known to enhance children's educational achievements and adult-life outcomes. Drawing on a longitudinal sample of children aged 0 to 5 years old from the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS), we show new evidence on the impact of center-based childcare intensity on non-cognitive development before school entry. Using a cumulative value-added approach, we evaluate to what extent center-based childcare intensity - measured in terms of weekly hours - from 0 to 3 years old impacts adaptive behavior and socio-emotional skills at ages three and five. Our results show that center-based childcare intensity from 0 to 2 years old has a positive effect on adaptive behavior at age three. We find similar patterns at age five, showing that childcare intensity from 0 to 3 years old reduces internalizing problems. The impact of center-based childcare intensity on non-cognitive development before schooling is consistent across different specifications and robustness checks. Our results are relevant to decisions concerning the reduction of inequalities in early life.

ABSTRACT. There is a theoretical debate about the relationship between patience and fertility. One side argues that a more patient person wants to have more children. The other side states otherwise. Previous empirical studies show that there is a positive relationship between patience and fertility. However, they fail to provide causality. We employ randomized treatment status in the experiment of patience level as an instrumental variable to eliminate bias from reverse causality. Our analysis uses a nationally representative survey dataset of Indonesia -a large, populous Muslim country- to analyze the effect of patience on mothers' willingness to have more children. In general, we found no effect of patience on fertility preference. Our analysis provides a piece of evidence that among mothers who have experienced childbearing, there is a positive impact of patience on a mother’s preference to have more children. The effect is driven by an increasing preference to have more sons. The effect is stronger in rural areas. We find no effect of patience on the preference to have more daughters.

ABSTRACT. The Covid-19 pandemic came unexpected and posed important challenges to governments all around the world. Several papers found that female leaders reacted di↵erently than male leaders in dealing with the sanitary emergency. The novelty of our approach is to focus on gender di↵erences in the allocation of public funds to overcame the economic crisis due to the pandemic. By exploiting mixed gender races in Italian local elections, we found that female mayors prioritized support to the economy (among all the possible public finance items) during the pandemic, compared to the years before the crisis. On the contrary, male mayors did not increase this category of spending over time. The drivers of such diverse reactions are still under scrutiny.

ABSTRACT. We study opinion dynamics in a balanced social structure consisting of two groups. Agents learn about the true state of the world by interacting with their neighbors and by listening to a source of information. They want to conform to the opinions of the other agents in the same group, but reject the opinions of the agents from the other group. We characterize the long-run opinions and show that the agents’ long-run opinions depend on either their weighted Katz-Bonacich centrality or eigenvector centrality in the signed network of opinion exchange, which allows for both positive and negative links. We also study the effect of group size, the weight given to unbiased information, and homophily when agents in the same group are homogeneous.

ABSTRACT. We conduct an experimental study to examine the impact of priming with social expectations on an anti-coordination decision, i.e., the decision whether to stay home or go out in an El Farol Bar Game. Our study consists of two connected experiments: in Study 1 we elicit incentivized social expectations from our participants and then have them play the El Farol Bar Game; in Study 2 participants play two rounds of the El Farol Bar Game, with a prime concerning different social expectations from Study 1 (whereas the first round of the Baseline treatment involves no priming). Our results show that in Study 1 only eliciting empirical expectations have a significant effect on decision-making. On the other hand, participants' personal normative beliefs play a role in compensating for the uncertainty surrounding normative expectations. The evidence from Study 2 suggests that priming with information about social expectations can only lead to more cautious behavior - i.e., staying home - but does not increase the likelihood of taking risks for a higher payoff by going out. Additionally, a small proportion of participants change their decisions when primed with different social expectations in the second round, but this proportion does not vary significantly across conditions.

ABSTRACT. We examine theoretically and experimentally whether individuals balance moral rights and wrongs due to conscience cleaning or licensing. In the experiment, we vary the severity consequences of a moral wrong (a greedy offer in a Dictator Minigame) for another person (the recipient), which are assumed to affect the decision-maker’s ex-post moral self-image, and study whether they affect behaviour in a subsequent pro-social decision, i.e., a donation to a charity. Moreover, we manipulate whether the dictator can choose or not to have these consequences disclosed to test whether moral accounting is such a rooted phenomenon to induce decision makers to strategically avoid information that would imply a reversal in their motivations for the following donation decision.

ABSTRACT. Religion has been shown having a huge influence on economic behavior. In this paper, we study the relationship between religious morality and the provision of public goods. In particular, we develop a theoretical model which characterizes Protestants and Catholics in terms of their moral attitudes, where the Protestants have a fixed norm that describes the appropriate level of contribution, while Catholics are guilt averse and do not want to disappoint others' expectations. We investigate how these different types of moral affect contributions to public goods in both homogeneous and heterogeneous societies. The findings reveal that contribution differences exist only among middle-class individuals, while the two morals have similar effects on rich and poor individuals. In heterogeneous societies, the composition of the society influences only the contribution of Catholics. Additionally, the extent to which Catholics' behavior responds to the societal composition depends on the level of social integration.

We then test empirically the main predictions of the model by investigating stated-preference differences between Catholics and Protestants around the world. More specifically, we adopt an epidemiological approach exploiting variation across denominations of second generation migrants originating from immigrant parents.

ABSTRACT. The UK imports many doctors from abroad, where medical training and experience might be different. This study attempts to understand how drug prescription behaviour differs in English GP practices which have larger or smaller numbers of foreign-trained GPs. Results show that in general practices with a high share of GPs trained outside the UK, prescriptions for antibiotics, mental health medication, analgesics and antacids are higher, controlling for the characteristics of the patients and the practices. However, we find no evidence of any significant impact of such different prescribing behaviour neither on patients’ satisfaction nor on unplanned hospitalisations, pointing to this behaviour being due to over-prescribing. Identifying differences in prescribing habits among GPs is paramount to identifying the policies best able to guarantee consistent services across GP practices and the consequent reduction of health inequalities.

ABSTRACT. Online health information seeking behavior is becoming increasingly common and its trend accelerated as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic when individuals strongly relied on the Internet to stay informed being exposed to a wider array of health information. Despite e-HISB has become a global trend, only a few empirical investigations on how it may affect healthcare access and individuals health exist. In this paper, we tried to fill this gap. To assess both the potential merits and shortcomings of seeking health information online and how doing so may affect individuals healthcare access and health status, we used data collected in the second SHARE Corona Survey supplemented with data from the previous 8th wave of SHARE. We constructed a joint model of e-HISB, healthcare access and individuals health status that considers an individual’s unobserved characteristics that are likely to be correlated with health information seeking, individuals’ health status and healthcare utilization.

ABSTRACT. Loneliness is increasingly being recognized as an important economic and public health issue. This paper investigates the relationship between historically rooted norms that drive individuals to conform to predefined behavioral standards and contemporary perceptions of social interactions and attitudes towards loneliness. Using a sub-population of second-generation immigrants, we identify an intergenerationally transmitted component of culture that reflects the importance of restrained discipline and rules characterizing highly intensive pre-industrial agricultural systems. We show that this cultural dimension influences perceptions of the quality of social relationships and significantly affects the likelihood of experiencing loneliness. The identified trait is then used to instrument loneliness in a two-stage model for health. We find that loneliness directly affects body mass index and some specific mental health issues. We argue, however, that loneliness may influence other health outcomes indirectly due to its economically significant effect on the increased body mass index. The results are robust to a battery of sensitivity checks. Our findings add to a growing body of research on the importance of attitudes in predicting significant economic and health outcomes, opening up a new channel via which deeply-rooted geographical, cultural, and individual characteristics may influence comparative economic development processes.

ABSTRACT. Background and Objective In Italy, the access to either general practitioner (GPs) or specialist presents a heterogeneous distribution, which is often related to socioeconomic factors. Specifically, richest and better educated individuals present higher access to specialists and lower access to GPs if compared to people in lower socioeconomic conditions. This evidence suggests that specialists’ visits price (either full or in the form of a co-payment) may represent a deterrent in the access to this level of care. Geographical differences in the supply of medical care may also impact on this heterogeneous pattern. The paper analyses the determinants of a the access to each category of physicians, adopting as main regressor the presence of private health insurance and controlling for the distribution of doctors at regional level.

Data and Methods We use data from the European Health Interview Survey, year 2019, a complete dataset providing over 45,000 individual observations on healthcare access, health status, demographic and socioeconomic variables from the Italian population. This source is still rather unused in applied research on these topics and may add evidence to existing literature. Data is modelled through a trivariate recursive probit, in order to account for possible endogeneity between healthcare need and presence of an integrative insurance.

Conclusions and Policy Implications Findings show a positive impact of health insurance on the probability of accessing specialists at least once in the four weeks preceding the interview, after controlling for doctors’ distribution, whilst no effects are detected for the access to GP care. This result suggests that price is a deterrent for medical care and raises equity issues for people in low socioeconomic conditions, who may find it onerous to disburse a co-payment. The concentration of physicians at regional level is also related to the probability of accessing either GPs or specialists, indicating that a more homogeneous distribution of medical personnel across Italy would help in avoiding inequalities.

Jel classification: I13, I14, D12

ABSTRACT. We perform a Meta Regression Analysis (MRA) of the literature on government expenditure and corruption, by retrieving the outcome from 39 primary papers published from 1998 to 2022. The main results are threefold. First, when estimates reported in the primary papers are made by methods that correct for endogeneity, the impact of government size on corruption is significantly lower. Second, estimates of the impact of government size on corruption found in published papers are significantly higher than in unpublished papers. Third, estimates made on panel data give significantly higher impact of government size on corruption.

ABSTRACT. While there is an extensive literature discussing the origins of the recent surge of populist parties and movements in advanced economy, very little is known about what the populists do once they reach power. We fill this gap, by investigating the fiscal behaviour of one of the most successful populist party in Europe, the Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S). Specifically, we focus on municipal finance and study econometrically the fiscal behaviour of M5S mayors in Italy and compare it with the behaviour of mayors belonging to traditional parties. We look at both specific categories of spending and at local taxes, and we also analyze the effects on the financial stability of municipalities. Finally, we also study the probability of re-election of a M5S mayor with respect to other mayors.

ABSTRACT. This paper studies how political polarisation affects budget decisions in municipal administrations, going beyond the existence of the well-known electoral budget cycles. More precisely, it aims to show empirically – using data at the municipal level – that political and electoral budget cycles are also affected by the level of political polarisation of municipal councils. This last variable may stand for stronger competition between parties to secure the next election or for more control of each party over the others regarding budget allocation and spending. Differently from the existing literature that considers polarisation as the distance existing between the most extreme parties in the elected bodies or through the preferences of politicians or voters about different policies, we use the Reynal-Querol (2002) index that measures polarization in terms of bipolarism. Following the main literature that shows the strategic use of budget policies and spending near elections, we take advantage of the elections’ staggered timing to exploit the polarisation role and examine whether the distribution of seats in the municipal councils matters for budget decisions. The main results show that the level of polarization in Italian municipalities plays a role in shaping budget decisions.

ABSTRACT. The quality of institutions is widely recognized as a fundamental factor for the success of the European Cohesion Policy. This study investigates whether the local quality of institutions influences the amount and allocation of EU Cohesion Policy funds between public and private beneficiaries, considering the policy's place-based structure that grants local institutions the power to influence the level of EU investments received. Relying on high quality of administrative data, we propose a novel measure of institutional quality at the municipal level in Italy, leveraging city council dismissals. To address the key identification challenges, we employ a staggered difference-in-differences (DID) strategy along with a matching procedure to ensure the absence of pre-trends between treated and control units. Our main finding reveals heterogeneous effects across different dimensions used to assess low institutional quality. Specifically, corruption within local governments leads to a reduction in EU investments allocated to the institutions themselves, whereas the low effectiveness of local bureaucracy increases EU funds directed towards public beneficiaries. These findings provide valuable insights into the varying impacts of different dimensions of institutional quality, offering important implications for policymakers and researchers studying the European Cohesion Policy.

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates the spillover effects of law enforcement and how such spillovers depend on the type of regulatory enforcement agents observe and the networks where such enforcement occurs. We study the case of mandate quotas for workers with disability in Brazil, a law establishing that firms with more than one hundred workers should reserve at least two percent of their vacancies for workers carrying a disability. We first employ a difference-in-discontinuity strategy to show that introducing new inspection procedures to verify compliance with the quota law increased the fines issued due to non-compliance and, consequently, the number of workers with a disability in firms subjected to the law. We then focus on spillovers arising from different types of law enforcement happening in firms' zip codes or their owner's networks. Through a stacked differences-in-differences strategy, we document that firm inspections, and fines unrelated to the quota law do not have spillover effects on firms located in the same zip code where they occur. However, if a firm receives a quota law fine, other firms in their zip code increase their number of workers with a disability. The pattern is different for law enforcement within a firm owner's network: all types of enforcement happening in a firm -- inspections, fines unrelated to the quota law, and quota law fines -- increase the number of workers with disabilities in the other firms within its owner's network. Finally, our results show that firms react to law enforcement mainly by poaching workers from other firms, which undermines the efficacy of such enforcement in including persons with disabilities outside of the formal labor market.

ABSTRACT. We estimate the effect of granting legal status to immigrant women on voluntary abortions. We exploit the 2007 EU enlargement as an exogenous shock to legal status for Romanian and Bulgarian women, considering Italy as a destination country. Using a standard Difference-in-Differences model, we estimate a decline between 60% and 70% in voluntary pregnancy termination (VPT) rates for the new EU citizens from the two Eastern countries. We also introduce a novel framework to separate the total effect of the enlargement into a “citizenship” effect due to (legal or illegal) migrants already present in Italy and a “selection” effect due to new flows of immigrants. Our estimates suggest that the “citizenship” (“selection”) effect accounts for a share of the total effect ranging between 30% and 60% (40% and 70%). We show that the findings are robust to several alternative explanations. The drop in abortions points to legal status as a way to empower immigrant women.

ABSTRACT. Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) eradication is now possible owing to new direct-acting antivirals (DAAs) discovered in 2014. The World Health Organization aims to eradicate Hepatitis C by 2030, boosting national screening programs to identify undiagnosed cases. However, several patients diagnosed with HCV chose not to undergo drug therapy despite adverse consequences for personal health and relevant costs to the national health system. This study analyzes the effect of disability benefits on the choice of uptake therapy using a recursive bivariate Probit model and data from an Italian region from 2013 to 2020. We find that entitlement to disability benefits may lead to an “illness trap” by disincentivizing the choice of receiving treatment. In this scenario, patients may prefer to stay ill as they are afraid to lose illness-related economic benefits. This effect is more substantial in low-income and older patients. These results suggest the need for healthcare policies to address this distorting effect when designing benefit programs, granting financial sustainability to sick people in need.

ABSTRACT. Public subsidies and tax credits for housing renovations and energy efficiency are increasingly adopted by governments worldwide, though there is limited research evidence on their net economic effects. We build a novel linked survey-tax administrative dataset to study the economic consequences of tax credits for housing renovations in Italy. We investigate if and to what extent tax credits sustain additional housing renovations and reduce tax evasion through the declarations of housing interventions previously undocumented to tax authorities. Our findings suggest that there is a reduction of tax evasion due to tax credits, but they do not have relevant effects on economic additionality. We also document the presence of heterogeneity in tax credit benefits across individuals and regions. We finally discuss the policy implications of our study.

ABSTRACT. Environmental regulation and pollution control may clash against the presence of unverifiable tasks, like source-specific emissions. To tackle this issue, we reshape a voluntary agreement instrument, already available in the received literature, from a dynamic perspective by means of a relational contracting approach. Setting up a Relational Voluntary Environmental Agreement (REA) may be of help when unveriÖability is an issue. In an N firm symmetric context, we show that even if emissions are not contractible across firms, and therefore enforcement cannot be delegated to a third party if Örms themselves are sufficiently patient, a self-enforcing equilibrium, under which the environmental objective is met voluntarily, exists. Finally, our welfare analysis reveals a notable result: our REA is always welfare-improving with respect to a Voluntary Environmental Agreement enforced by a third party (along the lines of McEvoy and Stranlund, 2010)

ABSTRACT. In March 2023 EU member states approved a new legislative resolution requiring all new vehicles sold to have zero CO2 emissions from 2035. This resolution has generated controversy among policymakers, stakeholders and scientists, mainly related to uncertainties regarding its ultimate effectiveness in generating an actual global reduction of pollution and CO2 emissions. However, what is uncontroversial about the shift toward zero-emission vehicular traffic is the potential to reduce air pollution – particularly in terms of Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) – at the local level in the most densely populated and polluted urban areas. In these areas, reducing local air pollution is indeed a major policy goal that can benefit citizens’ quality of life and health. This paper aims at estimating the predicted impact of the zero emission vehicles resolution on local NO2 air pollution using data from Regional Environmental Agency (ARPA) measurement stations of the regions located along the Po-river basin, which represent the largest area of Europe with critically-high air pollutant values. To mimic the future scenario with zero emission vehicles, we exploit the occurrence of the Italian national Covid-19 lockdown of the first half of 2020, which provides a unique availability of data on a period of exogenous sharp abatement of fossil-fuel vehicular traffic. For the causal-inference analysis we develop an intertemporal Statistical Matching (SM) approach that relies on Propensity Score (PS) and Mahalanobis Distance (MAHD) techniques in the context of multivariate time-series data. This approach has a number of advantages compared to empirical strategies adopted in the recently-emerging literature on the air-quality impact of Covid-19 lockdowns, and it represents a viable tool for estimating at large the causal impact of public policies aimed at reducing air pollution. Our estimates show that the Covid-19 lockdown policy resulted in a significant drop in daily average NO2 levels, between -50.9% and -55.4%, from a baseline average value of about 25.5 μg/m3. These results are robust to a number of sensitivity analyses and provide empirical support to the prediction that a significant abatement of local NO2 pollution is likely to be achieved in areas with low air-quality standards by adopting policies aimed at reducing fossil-fuel vehicular traffic, such as the EU 2035 zero emission resolution.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines how and to what extent spatial interactions among EU national governments affect the stringency of environmental policies (EP). We innovate on the literature along three dimensions: 1) we evaluate the additional explanatory power of spatial interactions across countries to assess the “interaction dividend” associated with international treaties; 2) we better examine how political and institutional variables shape EP when such interactions are taken into account ; 3) we identify the type of EP for which these interactions play a more relevant role by considering the new EPS21 disaggregated indexes of policy stringency. In a sample of 21 European countries between 2000 and 2018, a benchmark model shows that, among the country-specific effects, proxies for the industries’ lobbying power, quality of governance, government’s ideology, decentralization and the urbanization rate of voters play important roles. When the model is extended to consider also the spatial interactions among countries, the estimates reveal that about 30-50% of a country’s commitment to EP can be attributed to positive spillover effects from other countries, depending on the type of policy, with more prominent effects in technology support policies. These results reinforce the need of supranational coordination through international organizations and treaties.

ABSTRACT. In most Sub-Saharan African countries, the agricultural sector is confronted with the major challenge of increasing production to feed a growing and increasingly prosperous population. In the meantime, irrigation is highly promoted to improve food security and foster agricultural production and malaria remains a significant health problem. In this context, this study aims at revisiting the impact of malaria on agricultural labor in an irrigation context in the eight West African Economic Monetary Union countries. We deal with the endogeneity concerns of malaria using the instrumental variables method. Our identification strategy is implemented with household data from Harmonized Survey on Household Living Conditions collected in 2018 and 2019. Results show that malaria prevalence in a household reduces significantly labor quantity while increasing labor productivity. Our results also suggest that the magnitude and significance of these links depend on irrigation on the one hand and household size on the other hand. The findings from the study highlight the need to strengthen access to malaria control, prevention information, and health service delivery system to enhance human health and agricultural productivity.

ABSTRACT. Using administrative data on prescriptions and diagnoses in England, we confirm the evidence found in the literature that children born just before the cut-off date for school entry are much more likely to be prescribed ADHD drugs and to be diagnosed with ADHD than children born after the cut-off date. We refer to these two groups of children as early and late school starters given that the former enter school almost one year earlier than the latter. Our main contribution is to provide new insights on the underlying mechanisms driving the relationship and to clarify why the effect of being an early starter persists across age.

ABSTRACT. We estimate the effect of energy poverty on a number of subjective and objective health indicators using ex-ante harmonized micro data from the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe. We account for the potential endogeneity of energy poverty exploiting regional weather-based Eurostat statistics about heating degree days. We find that energy poverty has a detrimental effect on physical health, measured through grip strength. More precisely, our estimates suggest that energy poverty reduces grip strength by 35\%. From a policy perspective, our results point to the need of financial support aimed at reducing heating self-rationing to mitigate inequalities in health. Governments should take into account also the energy poverty induced health-care costs in publicly funded systems when designing and evaluating decarbonization policies.

ABSTRACT. This paper estimates the effect of social capital on vaccination compliance. Using Italian high-frequency vaccination data for COVID-19 and social capital measures at the municipal level, we find that high social capital had a significant positive effect on the increase in weekly vaccination coverage rate for the overall population, with a maximum increase equal to 1.25%. Results do not differ by gender but the effect is mainly driven by younger generations, with the maximum estimated weekly increase being equal to 2.47% on May 31 among individuals aged 40-49. Our findings shed light on the role of social capital as a driver of health protective behaviour.

ABSTRACT. Poverty is associated with severe consequences in terms of individual and social well-being and should be a primary concern for policymakers: while many public policies indirectly affect poverty outcomes, it is widely agreed that minimum income schemes (MISs) are one of the most important tools for poverty alleviation. Targeting the poor, however, is a very difficult task since no unambiguous definition of poverty exists. This paper thus contributes to the literature in two ways: i) it proposes a novel theoretical framework to evaluate the target efficiency of MISs; ii) it exploits a unique dataset for Italy in 2019 to provide an empirical assessment of the target efficiency of the recently introduced Italian minimum income scheme – Reddito di Cittadinanza (RdC). The results are quite shocking: only 25% of poor households received RdC in 2019, while, from a different perspective, just over 40% of recipient households were also poor. In principle, such misalignment may depend on both the inadequacy of the RdC eligibility requirements (for instance, of residence requirements) and on the inadequacy of the HBS microdata to correctly identify absolute poverty at the household level. We address both of these issues. More specifically, we zoom in on the incorrectly targeted households (i.e., poor but not receiving and not poor but receiving households) and shed some light on the mechanisms driving these inefficiencies. Two interesting results are worth mentioning: almost a quarter of poor households not receiving the RdC self-declare an adequate level of well-being and do not apply to any welfare transfer or facilitation; conversely, expenditure mismeasurement and household definition play an important role in explaining II-type errors – i.e., non-poor households receiving the RdC.

ABSTRACT. We study the redistributive effect of inflation-induced revenue and expenditure variations for the Italian tax-benefit system in a context where pensions and social transfers are indexed to inflation and nominal wage growth struggles to keep up. By means of the EUROMOD microsimulation model and ad-hoc uprating techniques, we compare a scenario where benefits are indexed to inflation with two zero-inflation counterfactual scenarios. Wages, non-retirement market income components and wealth assets grow in the inflation-indexed scenario only following the steep increase in prices in 2022, though to a lesser extent than price growth in most cases. From the comparison we isolate the contribution of i) fiscal drag through progressive taxes, ii) SIC-related indexation rules and policy changes, iii) pension and social transfer indexation rules to the redistributive effect and its vertical and horizontal subeffects. Inflation-induced nominal gains amount to 26.0 or 15.2 billion euros according to whether we consider recent changes to contribution rates for employees as inflation-dependent policy changes or not. The findings suggest that benefit indexation rules and SIC-related revenue variations contribute to a non-negligible extent to income redistribution, while fiscal drag shows a little regressive effect. Pensioners are found to bear a less burdensome loss in relative purchasing power over private sector employees.

ABSTRACT. We use administrative data on the work and health histories of a random sample of Italian private sector workers and we exploit an institutional discontinuity resulting in an exogenous variation of replacement rates to study behavioural responses to a Disability Insurance (DI) scheme generosity. We find a significant DI claiming elasticity, driven by individuals entitled to the full benefit (lower incomes) and living in the Centre/South of the country, but no corresponding adjustment in labour supply, which is compatible with DI receipt. These findings may have relevant implications for the design of DI schemes also in response to social norms affecting claimants’ behaviours.

ABSTRACT. This paper aims at empirically testing the impact of the ‘18app’, a new voucher scheme introduced by the Italian government in 2016 to promote and increase the consumption of cultural goods and activities by 18-year-olds. Through a difference-in-difference research design, we assess the causal effect of the cultural voucher on the boost of cultural participation, both extensively and intensively, and across different income levels. For this purpose, we use repeated cross-sections of the annual household survey, ‘Aspects of Daily Life’, carried out by the Italian National Statistical Office (ISTAT) for the period 2013-2019, which includes a battery of questions on respondents’ cultural preferences. We find a significant impact of the cultural voucher in the increase of frequency visits to cinema, theaters (for high-income individuals) and classical music/opera (for low-income individuals). Moreover, the cultural voucher has prompted an increased rate of readers and promoted new ‘entrants’ into the book, movie and music online market. These findings are particularly meaningful both considering that this voucher scheme has inspired similar initiatives in other European countries, and in light of the recent proposal by the national government about a revision of the ‘18app’.

ABSTRACT. Would the quality of the local political class be higher if elected representatives were paid more? We answer this question by analysing a clear-cut natural experiment of a sizable salary increase for mayors in Italy approved at the end of 2021. Thanks to the adoption of a difference-in-discontinuity design implemented via a non-parametric robust bias-corrected estimator with covariate adjustment, we gauge the impact of the reform for municipalities just above or below the 5,000 inhabitants threshold, which corresponds to a sizable monthly wage increase for elected mayors. We find that the reform increased the educational quality of the elected mayor, while the impact on the quality of the executive committee and city council is noisy and it requires further investigations. There is also no impact on the level of competition, proxied by the change in the number of mayoral candidates, the margin of victory and the Herfindahl-Hirschman index.

ABSTRACT. This study examines whether the use of Internet-based communication technologies during election campaigns helps candidates to be elected to parliament and improves their perception of being able to win national elections. Using data from the 2013 Italian Candidate Survey, estimation results show that the use of a personal website during the electoral race significantly increases a candidate’s probability of winning the parliamentary mandate but does not influence her/his perception of her/his chances of success. ‘Tweeting’ during the campaign significantly improves candidates' perceptions of winning nationwide elections but not their likelihood of being elected to parliamentary office. Facebook has overall insignificant effects.

ABSTRACT. Tax evasion is one of the main challenges faced by developing and transition economies, depriving the affected countries of resources. Tax evasion is manifested in various forms including illicit financial flows (IFF). There is scarcity of literature on the inter-relation between tax evasion and elections, especially in the case IFF political cycles. We fill this gap by analyzing the impact of elections on trade mismatching for various developing countries, which can be considered a proxy for tax evasion and potentially for election driven corruption and clientelism. We use a fixed effects model to estimate whether there is an impact of elections on trade related IFF (mis-invoicing) for 44 developing/transition countries. The findings confirm statistically significant increase of IFF.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I assess the existence of a political connection premium for Italian municipalities during the so-called "Second Republic" (1991-2011). In the early ’90, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the most significant investigation in Italian Political history took place: Mani Pulite. Since that, all the major political parties disappeared and the resulting bipolar political scenario led to a cyclical alternation between two opposing poles: center-right and center-left (at least up to 2013). Exploiting population data of small and medium-sized Italian municipalities between 1991 and 2011, I found that "politically connected" municipalities showed a population premium of about 2.5% compared to "nonpolitically connected" ones. The results are robust to NUTS-3 fixed effects and to a full set of robustness checks. The relation is confirmed using MEF aggregate municipal income data as an additional proxy of local economic growth. Over and above that, social capital and the quality of local institutions seem to play a pivotal role in enabling political connection. Election-related checks suggest the connection as two-way: using municipal data from the 2013 general elections, I found that the treated municipalities depicted a higher turnout and fewer populist votes.

ABSTRACT. We study social mobility by exploiting a newly collected dataset of the surnames contained in local newspapers during almost a century in the Italian Province of Modena (NUTS-3 level). Under the hypothesis that the surnames that appear in the newspapers have a particular social relevance, changes in the distribution of the surnames over time allow to identify phases of greater or lower social change. The results show that the periods of greatest change have been the years of transition between democracy and the fascist regime and vice versa, and the 1980s. Regression towards the mean in the relative importance of surnames over long time spans is also observed. This kind of analysis can be fruitfully replicated at the national level and could also help in identifying different mobility patterns at local levels when income data are not available.

ABSTRACT. This paper formulates a principle of Prioritarian Equality of Opportunity (P-EOp) that nests the most common denition of EOp and the standard equality of income principles as special cases. Hence, both inequality of opportunity and inequality of outcome are relevant in our distributional criterion, but priority is recognized to (aversion to) inequality of opportunity. We define a family of social welfare functions that represents the P-EOp ranking of income distributions. We normalize social welfare in terms of equally distributed equivalent, so that it is immediate to derive inequality indices a' la Atkinson (1970). We complete the theoretical framework by proposing a criterion for robust partial rankings of distributions in terms of P-EOp. Finally, we show the relevance of our proposal for the evaluation of the income distributions in several European countries.

ABSTRACT. This study aims to investigate the contribution of household composition on poverty, and inequality across six European countries: Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Netherlands, and Sweden. Using data from the EU-SILC survey for the year 2018, we reweight individuals in each country according to the family composition in a reference country. By comparing the poverty and inequality levels in these new populations to the original populations, we assess the effect of household composition on poverty and inequality in each country. Preliminary findings suggest that the effects of household composition on poverty and inequality differ across countries, with some countries experiencing reductions in both dimensions of well-being when "Swedishized" or "Germanized," while others show divergent results.

ABSTRACT. Health is a fundamental human right, and good health is an essential component of well-being; therefore, an efficient public health system is required to achieve well-being in society. This paper analyses the relationship between public health efficiency and well-being considering a panel of 102 Italian provinces from 2000 to 2016. The results show that public health efficiency enhances well-being in Italian provinces, especially in the North. The findings could help policymakers adopt measures to strengthen the public health system, encourage private providers, and inspire countries worldwide.

ABSTRACT. External reference pricing (ERP) is a policy tool widely used among EU Members to curb pharmaceutical spending. ERP is a mechanism through which national regulators link price negotiations for a new medicine to a benchmark price based on prices of the same product adopted in other countries. Its wide adoption can lead to negative externalities for the pharmaceutical industry if low list prices propagate due to cross-referencing. In order to circumvent such externalities, manufacturers often concede secret discounts on list prices. This paper documents the impact of the adoption of ERP policies when secret discounts are conceded. I develop a three-stage model with two countries (Home and Foreign) and a Manufacturer. First, the Home country decides whether to adopt ERP. Second, the Manufacturer decides where to launch the drug. Third, the Manufacturer Nash bargains over the price in the selected market(s). I show that the introduction of secret discounts in the Foreign country discourages the adoption of ERP by the Home country, which, in turn, can still adopt it to reduce the risk of future high prices when its bargaining power is uncertain. Finally, I show that the Manufacturer is more likely to enter the Foreign market if secret discounts are conceded.

ABSTRACT. There has been a long debate in public finance about the factors that shape the size of government. One widely analyzed is the number of politicians. However, there is no clear evidence of the direction of its effect. This study aims at reconciling this contrast by introducing a new element: the role that politicians play in the government. Using unique administrative data from Italian municipalities and an instrumental variable strategy, I find that the role of local politicians matters. More executive politicians increase expenditure, through higher investments that are financed via capital transfers; more councilors, instead, curb investments. I explain these findings via specialization in the executive and increased political fragmentation for the council. This behavior benefits the executive politicians' careers within the municipal government and allows them to move to higher offices.

ABSTRACT. This paper addresses the assessment of individual income growth providing a framework in which each individual accounts for own income growth and the growth of each individual’s reference group. We take as a starting point the concept of relative deprivation, in which an individual compares with those who are better off, and interpret it as the extent to which an individual is left behind. In this line, we propose that individuals evaluate their income and compare it with the income growth of other people in society, which is taken as a sort of benchmark. After some computation, progressive change and re-ranking are identified at the individual level, and the first component is broken down into one term that captures growth self-concern and another that accounts for growth concerning others, or relative concerns. The empirical application to Spain over the past ten years shows that this measure supplements the analyses based on standard income distribution metrics and how it helps identify the different aspects of income growth assessment. JEL: D31, I32

ABSTRACT. We axiomatically characterize an absolute and a relative divergence measure. The absolute divergence between two distributions x and y is measured by applying an absolute inequality index to the vector of differences x - y, whereas the relative divergence measure applies a relative inequality index to the vector of ratios x/y. We argue that measuring divergence in this manner is particularly suited to situations where one of the two distributions is a reference distribution, for example in terms of fairness, for the former. Our divergence measures boil down to standard income inequality measures when the reference distribution is perfectly egalitarian.

ABSTRACT. The measurement of many economic phenomena, such as income inequality, poverty, richness, inequality of opportunity, economic mobility, wage discrimination and goodness of fit, among others, are examples of measuring the divergence between distributions. In all these examples there is a reference distribution and the aim is to examine to what extent any given distribution differs from the reference one. This paper provides an axiomatic characterization of a family of indices to measure the divergence between distributions, explores the relation- ship of the derived family with other existing measures, and introduces new indices in the mentioned fields.

ABSTRACT. How do changes in the characteristics of an income distribution affect monetary poverty? Point elasticities à la Kakwani (1993) may be helpful for this purpose. Still, the rigidity of the relative distribution transform considered by the author has made its use somehow unappealing for empirical purposes. Here we show that new insights can be obtained from this approach and that more flexibility can easily be obtained. An application is provided for Brazil during the period 1981--2014.

ABSTRACT. We define populism as a platform proposing a policy based on a mis-specified model of the world, an alternative worldview. Voters’ trust in the mainstream political class evolves over time and depends on traditional politicians’ performance once in office. Crucially we assume this political distrust behaviourally increases the trust in alternative worldviews proposed by populists. Traditional politicians are aware of this risk and try to prevent it. Using this novel framework, we study when voters elect populist politicians, how populist and their alternative worldviews survive/recur and their long-run effect on several measures of voter's welfare. We show the link between distrust and alt-truth gives rise to ``populist cycles'' where trust never converges to its true level. However, cycles can be welfare improving for the voter. The increased pervasiveness of alt-worldviews is not always detrimental as it has a disciplining effect on mainstream politicians.

ABSTRACT. Distress caused by the economic environment is thought to lead to higher levels of group bias, a core cause of polarization. Using an incentivized online survey, we test the causal relationship between group bias against non-nationals and the negative economic shock resulting from the restrictions due to COVID-19. The nature of this shock results in a nearly exogenous assignment of economic distress, reducing possible selection effects. We find no differences emerge, on average, in the revealed group bias between individuals who were and were not affected by the shock. This effect is robust to various specifications and also does not depend on the amount of blame that can be placed on non-nationals for the current situation. We also show the same result holds for UK students whose job prospects were dimmed as a result of the pandemic. This finding counters the notion that nationalistic group bias is caused by economic distress and provides insight into how economic shocks may or may not affect polarization.

ABSTRACT. While individuals hold, exchange, and update opinions over multiple issues, opinions are often correlated and a unidimensional spectrum is enough to summarize them. But when should one expect opinions to be unidimensional? And how important is the underlying structure of communication? Our experimental results: i) validate the crisp predictions by DeMarzo et al. (2003) when individuals update their opinions on a fixed network always trusting the same neighbors, ii) jointly with simulations indicate the prevalence of unidimensionality as an expected outcome even when communication is less structured with individuals’ network possibly varying over time, and iii) highlight the importance of the communication structure in predicting whether individuals hold relatively moderate or extreme opinions.

ABSTRACT. We study the effect of an immigration ban on the self-selection of immigrants along cultural traits, and the transmission of these cultural traits to the second generation. We show theoretically that restricting immigration incentivizes to settle abroad individuals with a high attachment to their origin culture, who, under free mobility, would rather choose circular migration. Once abroad, these individuals convey their cultural traits to their children. Consequently, restrictive immigration policies can foster the diffusion of cultural traits across space and generations. We focus on religiosity, which is one of the most persistent and distinctive traits, and exploit the 1973 immigration ban in West Germany (Anwerbestopp) as a natural experiment. Through a diff-in-diff analysis, we find that second generations born from parents treated by the Anwerbestopp show a higher level of religiosity.

ABSTRACT. Using survey microdata for the USA, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Great Britain, the paper applies influence function regression to estimate the impact on wealth inequality of a ceteris paribus marginal increase in the proportion of recipients of wealth transfers of differing sizes. The results show that whereas more transfer recipients would be expected to reduce wealth inequality on average, an increase in recipients of large transfers would increase overall wealth inequality, as those recipients are concentrated around the top of the wealth distribution. The identified threshold above which transfers become disequalizing can be informative for the design of capital receipts taxes.

ABSTRACT. In this paper we analyze how the demographic structure of a society affects the composition of public spending, in terms of education expenditure and pension programs. We use a political–economy model of fiscal policy where the cost of voting and intergenerational conflict determine the allocation of public budget. Since taxation on the young people is also used to finance transfers to the elderly, there is an intergenerational conflict. In the electoral equilibrium, we show that an increasing share of young people has ambiguous effects. On the one hand, the younger the society the larger the amount of taxes collected that can finance larger pension programs. On the other hand, since young people are likely to prefer that public resources are mainly devoted to education, they will push for the latter and, consequently, for reducing transfers to the elderly.

ABSTRACT. The paper builds on new and unexploited SHARE drop-off data to analyze preferences for inter-generational redistribution towards the young. In particular, it analyzes whether those individuals who agree about the necessity of reducing the generosity of the pension system, are more likely to transfer resources to the young: a) by supporting macroeconomic reforms that aim at favoring policies targeting the young, such as active labor market policies and b) by making inter-vivos transfers to younger cohorts. In doing this, we control for a few potentially additional determinants of transfers, namely: misperceptions about their positioning in the income distribution, having been obliged to postpone retirement because of a pension reform, reciprocity, and general altruism. The empirical analysis focuses on Belgium, Italy, and Spain, three countries with relatively unbalanced pension systems. We find that preferences for actuarially fair pension rules stimulate individuals to transfer to younger generations both by supporting reforms targeting the young and making intra-household inter-vivos transfers. People who believe themselves to be poorer than they actually are, ceteris paribus, are transferring less. Inter-vivos transfers are also positively driven by having been obliged to postpone retirement, altruism, and reciprocity.

ABSTRACT. We investigate characteristics of working pensioners in Italy, using a combination of administrative and survey data, for the period 2004-2017. We address the question of whether working pensioners are those with lower household income. We find that pensioners in the first decile of net household disposable income are associated with a higher probability of working.

ABSTRACT. Many small firms lack the managerial competences needed for growth. Consultancy could provide them with such skills, but market and behavioral frictions can prevent firms to use these services. We study whether subsidizing consultancy can boost firm performance by analyzing an Italian program that granted firms a small monetary contribution to acquire consultancy services for export. We identify the causal impact of the policy in a difference-in-differences framework by comparing firms that nearly got the subsidy and firms that nearly did not due to small differences in their time of application. The subsidy was highly effective in improving exports outside the EU, and it increased firm labor productivity, profitability, and size. Interviews with consultants show that initial contract generated a long-term relationship with beneficiary firms, with providers offering also other services such as support for digitalization.

ABSTRACT. Using data on the universe of private sector employment we investigate the rise in earnings inequality in Italy. We find that 55% of the rise in earnings inequality between 1985 and 2018 took place between industries, while only 18% took place be- tween firms within the same industry and 27% took place within firms. The growth in inequality between industries was very concentrated with less than 3% of industries accounting for two-thirds of the total inequality-increasing effect, while only represent- ing around 7% of employment. The rise in inequality was predominantly driven by rising employment in low-paying industries and by increasing earnings in high-paying industries. Despite very large institutional differences, the patterns of rising inequality in Italy are remarkably similar to the ones identified for the USA which suggests that the underlying forces were likely similar.

ABSTRACT. This paper provides the first analysis of a population-wide controlled field experiment for home visits checking on sick leave in the public sector. The experiment was carried out in Italy, a country with large absenteeism in the public sector, and it concerned the universe of public employees. We exploit unique administrative data from the Italian social security administration (INPS) on sick leave and work histories. We find that receiving a home visit reduces the number of days on sick leave in the following 16 months by about 12% (5.5 days). The effect is stronger for workers who are found irregularly on sick leave (-10.2 days). We interpret our findings as a deterrence effect of home visits: workers being found irregularly on sick leave experience a decline of about 2% of their wage in th following 12 months. Uncertainty aversion (there is no automatism in these sanctions) can play a role in these results. Our estimates suggest that home visits are cost-effective: every Euro spent for the visits involves up to 10 Euros reductions in sick benefits outlays. We estimate the marginal value of public funds (MVPF) spent on home visits at about 1.13, which is significantly lower than estimates of MVPF of income taxes in the US.

ABSTRACT. This paper presents a study on factors that have been identified in previous literature as drivers or hindrances to households’ adoption of behavioural changes concerning energy efficiency. A Choice Experiment survey has been conducted in Ireland and Italy, aimed at eliciting households’ preferences regarding adoption of innovative heating/cooling systems. The choice data, drawing from combined nationwide samples of over 2,700 respondents, is analysed through a Latent Class model, and posterior analysis is used for class profiling, to detect the emergence of factors identified in the literature. In both samples, willingness to pay and intention to innovate are found to be strongly correlated with attitudes toward environment and innovation for two classes or respondents, whereas one class of individuals is more heterogeneous and less predictable: in this case, trialability of the system seems to be an important leverage to foster innovation. Guidelines for targeted information and dissemination campaigns are suggested, based on the results of the analysis. The practical indications provided in this work are useful for further implementation of European policies aimed at energy transition, such as the RED II (Revised Renewable Energy Directive, 2018) and especially the Near Zero Building Directive (2021).

ABSTRACT. The EU has already issued the objectives to be complied with by Member States within 2050. On the other hand, enterprises are facing the effects of a changing climate mostly related to the increase in the likelihood of extreme events (physical risk) and uncertainty of the policy framework (transition risk). In this framework, this work will try to assess whether political pressure through different channels (e.g., lobbying, political connections, corruption) has an effect on the impact of environmental regulation on day-to-day operations. The EU experiences political pressure to either promote more stringent climate targets or to favor less stringent standards for enterprises. Results show that firms that perceive the environment as an obstacle are also those that make use of political pressure to stir government’s decisions. This is more valid for manufacturing and large enterprises heavily burdened by environmental regulations. However, despite quality of government there is still a component of uncertainty in the regulatory framework, especially in non-manufacturing enterprirses. Thus, under-regulation (or lack thereof) could be a factor influencing the perception of environmental regulations for certain economic sectors.

ABSTRACT. Food production is responsible for large environmental impacts, contributing to approximately 20%-24% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Considering the United Nations' projection, the world’s population is expected to increase from the current 8 billion to 9.7 billion in 2050 and could peak at nearly 10.4 billion in the mid-2080s, with an inevitable increase in food demand. However, the resulting increase in the environmental impact of the food product life cycle can be significantly reduced by encouraging producers and consumers to make more sustainable choices for the environment. On the producer side the adoption of new technologies that reduce environmental impact and increase productivity is important, while on the consumer side it is crucial to inform and raise awareness among consumers, enabling them to make more conscious food choices and, possibly, adopt less impactful lifestyles. This paper is aimed at evaluating the attitude and level of consumer acceptance towards carbon related policies such as carbon taxes and carbon footprint labels. In more detail, the willingness to pay a carbon tax or a price premium in relation to a carbon label, investigated in relation to two food products with different characteristics: milk, considered an everyday necessary good and chocolate, an indulgent and non-essential food. Data were collected via face to face and on-line surveys and analysed by inferential tools. Results seem to indicate a difference in the willingness to incur a higher cost for a less impactful product between goods considered more necessary, such as milk, and indulgent ones, like chocolate.

ABSTRACT. We investigate an eco-industry featuring an environmental good (i.e. abatement) provider upstream, which acts as an input for a downstream asymmetric duopoly. The good provided by the upstream firm is an input for the less efficient firm downstream, while the more efficient firm engages in abatement investment directly. The cost asymmetry across the two firms downstream is therefore (also) determined by the nature (fixed or variable) of abatement costs. In this set-up, we compare two policy settings: one where the regulator commits to policy before observing abatement investment, and one where such commitment is not credible (i.e. time-consistency). We conclude that, in the latter setting, emission taxes are lower, whilst environmental innovation, aggregate profits and consumers’ surplus are enhanced with respect to the case with commitment. The welfare ranking is however not straightforward, as commitment may make society better off than under time-consistency, depending on the degree of technological asymmetry. Moreover policy makers may be ”trapped” in a time-consistent policy scenario, due to the interest of involved stakeholders, at the expense of environmental policy effectiveness.

ABSTRACT. As widely recognized, women play a key role in improving the quality of political institutions. Indeed, several studies provide a cross-country evidence showing that increasing women’s political representation substantially reduce different measures of corruption both in developed and developing countries (e.g., [...]). Consistently with this evidence, survey-based analyses show that voters perceive female politicians to be less prone to malfeasance than male ones (e.g., ?). The most likely driver of these results is imputed to a gender difference in the preferences for honesty. Specifically, studies mainly based on the experimental method, document that women are more pro-social and less motivated by material incentives in their choices than men (e.g., [...]). This attitude prevents women to be involved in bribery activities when holding a public office. Hence, an increase in women’s political representation is advocated as an improvement of the quality of political institutions because it increases the average honesty of the pool of politicians. In this paper, we provide an empirical assessment of the implications of the increase in women’s political representation for organized crime activities to influence politics. ? has developed one of the most influential theoretical frameworks for studying how pressure groups (in our case, criminal organizations) maximize the expected payoff to political influence thanks to an optimal mix of bribery and threats of violent punishment in case politicians reject the bribe offer. A natural implication is that the probability of rejection of a bribe offer, and therefore the level of organized crime violence against public officials, is increasing in the average honesty of the politicians’ pool. Thus, in as much as politicians’ average honesty is increasing in the level of women’s political representation, then this framework predicts that criminal organization use of violence increases in the share of female politicians. We test this prediction by implementing an instrumental variable analysis. Specifically, we exploit the the introduction, in 2012, of Law 215/2012 that prescribes for the election of city councilors double preference voting conditioned on gender in municipalities with more than 5, 000 resident population. The introduction of the gender quota law represents an exogenous variation in the gender composition of the municipal political body (?). We, therefore, collect data on the gender composition of Italian city councils (provided by the Italian Ministry of the Interior), in the Italian municipalities in the regions voting under Law 215/2012 and with population below 15,000 inhabitants between 2010 and 2019. We, therefore, rely on the sharp increase in female councilors due to Law 215/2012 as a quasiexperimental setting where we take as treatment group the municipalities affected by the gender quota reform (those with resident population between 5, 000 and 15, 000 inhabitants) and as control group the municipalities with less than 5, 000 inhabitants, unaffected by the reform. We, then, construct a dataset of our main outcome variable of the attacks against local 2 politicians in Italy from 2010 to 2019 provided by Avviso Pubblico, a non-governmental organization that collects daily media reports of threats and attacks directed against Italian politicians. This allows us to test whether the increase of the share of female councilors in Italian municipalities due to the introduction of Law 215 determines an increase in the probability of attacks against local politicians. In line with the previous research by ?, our analysis shows that the enforcement of Law 215 appointed a higher share of women in city council. In detail, municipalities voting under the Law 215/2012 observed an increase by 15.8% in the share of female councilors with respect to the control group of municipalities. Most importantly, we provide strong evidence that the level of violence in a municipality increases with the share of females in local political body. Specifically, a 1% increase in the share of female councilors increase the probability of attacks against local politicians by 12.5 p.p. Our main result on the increase of the probability of attacks due to the increase of the share of female politicians in the city council is confirmed by different model specifications, estimation methods (i.e., Poisson model), robustness checks and placebo tests. Moreover, we provide several tests supporting the validity of the proposed instrumental variable approach.

ABSTRACT. This study examines whether female politicians are more likely to be attacked than their male counterparts, and why. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that Italian municipalities electing a female mayor are three times as likely to have their mayor targeted by an attack than those electing a male mayor. We investigate whether attacks are driven by discrimination or policy choices and find that attacks are more likely for female mayors in their first term, particularly within the first two years. Furthermore, while policy choices correlate with attacks for male mayors, they do not explain episodes targeting female mayors. Finally, female politicians targeted by attacks are less likely to seek office again, suggesting that attacks have a greater impact when directed at women. Our findings show that women are more vulnerable to being attacked regardless of their policy positions, particularly when they are new players in the political arena.

ABSTRACT. This paper employs machine learning techniques to analyze the full structure of municipal budgets, enhancing the comprehension of governmental policy decisions. Utilizing data from 8,000 Italian municipalities (1998-2015), we transform each budget into a low-dimensional vector through dimensionality reduction. We compute the cosine similarity between budgets, unveiling correlations between budget divergence and various factors such as geographical, socio-demographic, and political characteristics. Next, we use the cosine similarity measure to generate a novel indicator of policy divergence within Italian regions. This serves as a valuable variable for estimating the effect of various influences on the autonomy of municipal governments or differences in preferences among constituents. Our approach provides a deeper understanding of the determinants influencing policy-making, broadening the scope of public finance literature.

ABSTRACT. Can female-led protests improve women's participation in the political sphere? The 2017 Women's March is the largest single-day protest to ever happen in the US and a showcase of female leadership. I exploit the geographic variation in congressional districts' exposure to protests to investigate the impact of the March on the supply of female politicians in partisan primaries. I use difference-in-differences designs and event-study analyses that leverage distance from the nearest protest and find heterogeneous results across partisan primaries. The March affects the supply of female Republican politicians: doubling the distance leads to a 29% drop of the probability of having at least one female candidate and to a 60% drop of the share of female candidates. The March also increases the demand for women in Republican primaries open to unaffiliated voters: doubling the distance causes a 58% drop in the share of votes for females, but there is no evidence of an effect on the probability that a woman wins her primary. As regards Democratic primaries, I find no evidence of an effect of the uprisings. Moreover, I investigate the consequences for women's representation in federal politics. My results point towards the Democratic Party implementing a strategy that allows them to capitalize on the Women's March: doubling the distance decreases the probability of having a female Democratic US House Representative by 40\%.

ABSTRACT. The differing fiscal needs of municipalities introduce bias into yardstick competition among local administrators driven by pure rent-seeking motives. In certain scenarios, disparities in institutional quality may alleviate this bias, while in other cases, it worsens the situation. The influence of institutional quality on this bias varies across cases, sometimes alleviating it, while in other instances exacerbating it. Inter-municipal consortia provide incumbents with control over political yardstick competition. However, this alliance frequently compromises the quality of public services as rent extraction becomes the priority. To address the issue of collusion and enhance accountability, the central government may find it counterproductive to uniformly improve institutional quality across all districts. Instead, a more effective approach may involve targeted policy interventions in specific districts, taking into account the varying levels of fiscal and institutional disparities. By doing so, the central government can disrupt the incentive for collusion and rent extraction among local incumbents. Matching grants from upper levels of government or economies of scale can incentivize collaboration among municipalities by reducing the cost of supplying local public goods. However, these measures do not necessarily lead to an improvement in the quality of local public services.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, we examine the nonlinear relationship between the number of fiscal rules in place and compliance with the European Union (EU) numerical fiscal targets included in the Stability and Growth Pact. Using a sample composed of 27 EU Member States for a period spanning 2000 to 2021, we document that countries’ compliance with fiscal rules is positively associated with the number of numerical fiscal targets, but up to a certain threshold. Once this threshold is achieved, the relationship becomes negative, implying that a higher number of numerical fiscal rules may undermine compliance, thereby reducing their effectiveness. In addition, we find that general elections and frequent changes in government reduce compliance, whereas economic adjustment programmes contribute positively to countries’ compliance with fiscal targets. Findings bear critical policy implications against the backdrop of the current review of the European fiscal framework.

ABSTRACT. The key question of this paper is whether the conditions of financial distress recently experienced by Italian municipalities can be at least partially imputed but also to the inadequacy of financial resources some municipalities suffer compared to the needs of their populations and territories. Starting from a multidimensional definition of financial distress, we investigate this issue by exploiting the new mechanism of equalization transfers recently implemented in Italy at municipal level which provides an exogenous measure of the resource gap possibly suffered by each municipality compared to their needs assessed on a standardized basis. The estimation results show that the Italian municipalities suffering from a level of resources below what is necessary to provide public services at standard levels are, ceteris paribus, more prone to run into financial difficulties. By the same token, large cuts in central government transfers have a statistically significant effect on financial vulnerability at municipal level.

ABSTRACT. Fiscal rules are often implemented to limit the budget deficits of local governments. Such fiscal policy enforcement may have the unintended effect of limiting the opportunistic behaviour of local administrators. This paper exploits the extension of a policy aimed at imposing a reduction in the fiscal gap (the Domestic Stability Pact) that produces exogenous variations in the budget of some Italian municipalities. Results show that due to such budget constraints, municipal governments react by containing unproductive expenditures, positively affecting economic development. The main operating channel might be a more efficient allocation of expenditures and the improved accountability of local governments.

ABSTRACT. Healthcare typologies are an essential tool for comparing the similarities and differences regarding how countries fund, provide, and organize their healthcare. In this paper, we focus on two distinctive features of healthcare systems: (1) the overall level of expenditure on healthcare and the public–private mix; (2) the primary care vs specialist care orientation. Our aim is to investigate the variation of these two features in European countries adopting a political economy framework. To this goal, we build a political economy model to identify the main political drivers of these features of healthcare systems. Income inequality plays a fundamental role in deciding the equilibrium public health budget and its allocation between different types of healthcare. The model exhibits a potential for multiple equilibria that might explain the path dependence and persistence of healthcare regimes. We finally run a cluster analysis to verify whether the theoretical results are consistent with the empirical evidence collected in 25 European countries.

ABSTRACT. We examine the substitution between primary and emergency secondary care in patients with chronic conditions by using a dynamic structural model for longitudinal count data. The Hidden Markov Bivariate Poisson model allows for disentangling unobservable time-varying heterogeneity from the dynamic effect of utilisation of primary and secondary care. Also, unobserved heterogeneity can be modelled as a function of observable individual characteristics, including age, income and education. We find that an additional standard visit in primary care reduce utilisation of emergency care by 9 percent, while the substitution effect of preventive assessment visits is two times larger. The substitution effect is larger in individuals with a high utilisation profile, it decreases with individual age, while it shows little difference by socioeconomic status. Finally, the probability of switching utilisation profile decreases with age. Our analysis contributes to the existing evidence on the substitution effect from policy evaluation studies.

ABSTRACT. Several actions have been taken to address telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic. The federal government has loosened restrictions on telehealth in the Medicare program, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has been waived for telemedicine by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS). Many state governments have focused on expanding telehealth in their Medicaid programs and relaxing state-level restrictions around provider licensing, online prescribing, and written consent. Commercial insurers have also voluntarily addressed telemedicine, focusing on reducing or eliminating cost sharing, broadening coverage of telemedicine, and expanding in-network telemedicine providers. Despite these efforts, gaps in ensuring access to telemedicine during the COVID-19 pandemic remain. Service parity and payment parity for telehealth across all insurers would help increase access for patients and incentivize providers to offer these services, although it would also increase spending. Gaps in technology access and use among certain patient groups may also be a concern. The purpose of this research is to estimate a partial equilibrium of demand and supply of telehealth services using Household Pulse Survey Data provided by the US Census Bureau. We aim at studying the impact of US federal and state policies aimed at eliminating barriers to telehealth on the demand and supply of telehealth services during the 2021-2022 pandemic period, analyzing the effects of various licensure and health insurance reimbursement regulations on the frequency of telehealth practice while taking government and medical advancement trust into account. Estimating the effect of regulatory changes during pandemic crisis we also obtain an indirect measure of the effect of telehealth barriers before pandemic crisis.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I investigate the extent to which chronic pain is associated with socioeconomic status in mid-life in fourteen European countries (Luxembourg, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Estonia) and the United States. Specifically, I exploit newly available data from SHARE and HRS to study (i) the variability in the rates of pain across the 15 countries, (ii) whether sex-based differences in pain are relatively similar across countries, (iii) which country-specific characteristics matter the most for people in the bottom of the income distribution (Chetty et al., 2016), and (iv) whether greater use of pain medication is associated with lower (or higher) rates of aggregate pain (Krebs et al., 2018).

ABSTRACT. One of the key issues in the empirical literature on gas distribution costs is the analysis of the economies of scale. Unfortunately, the evidence on the extent, or even the existence, of economies of scale is not conclusive. In this paper we propose a new viewpoint on the issue, emphasizing that there is not a unique way the network managed by a gas distributor can grow: our intuition is that growth without improvement in the coherence of the spatial location of the network leads to modest (if any) economies of scale. On the contrary, if the growth is associated to an increase in compactness and proximity, economies of scale may be substantial. Based on cluster analysis and econometric panel data techniques, we find empirical evidence of this intuition. We believe that our results might contribute to explaining some contradictory results in the previous literature; more importantly, they have policy implications on how a gas distribution system as fragmented as the Italian one should be re-organized to improve its economic efficiency.

ABSTRACT. In a continuous-time setting, we study the design of a dynamic con- tract between a government and a private entity, wherein the latter commits to pay the government in return for the exclusive right to sell a service by operating a public facility. Private revenues are modelled as depending on the unobservable ability to seize market opportuni- ties and on imperfectly correlated changes in consumers' preferences. We nd that optimal regulation requires an appropriate combination of xed and variable payments to the government, acting together both as an information revelation mechanism and as a risk sharing device. We show how each component can be aected by the agent's type, the expected volatility of private revenues and the importance attached by the contracting authority to public receipts relative to other welfare concerns.

ABSTRACT. We exploit tax holidays in response to the invasion of Ukraine to study how the pass-through of gasoline taxes varies with market power. We are able to observe both the number of competitors faced by a gas station and its markup over marginal cost. Our findings are consistent with a model in which multiple equilibria are sustained in markets with a low concentration of gas stations, leading to more heterogeneity in pass-through, while only a competitive equilibrium is sustained in markets with many competitors. We present evidence that those gas stations that are able to collude, and charge high markups, only passed about 60\% of the tax cut on to consumer prices. Gas stations with low markups, instead, passed on virtually the entirety of the tax cut.

ABSTRACT. We study a sequential screening problem in which both the mean and the spread of a distribution are privately known. As in the literature, the screening instrument is the probability of the transaction taking place. Referring to a task delegation, we take the unknown variable to be the cost of executing an activity, and the decision variable to be the probability of the agent being required to perform that activity for the principal. Under the local incentive constraints to be satisfied in the first stage of the relationship, groups of types are identified such that, within each group, higher-mean-and-lower-spread types are bunched with lower-mean-and-higher-spread types. As a consequence, the global incentive constraints and the constraints related to private observation of the shock in the second stage are all satisfied. Furthermore, to attain local incentive compatibility, the likelihood of the agent being required to execute the activity is set lower when moving towards groups of types with a higher mean and/or spread of the cost. By characterizing the contract in a discrete four-type example, we also show that there exist conditions such that bunching is not optimal and the principal concedes a higher rent. We provide the solution to the general program and find that local incentive constraints impose no additional restrictions if high-mean-and-low-spread types, the most attractive lies for other types, have sufficiently low frequencies. This is true, in particular, when the mean is “almost” uniformly distributed. We discuss the solution for a case where the mean and the spread are both uniformly distributed.