ABSTRACT. Italy had the longest school closures among European countries during the first and subsequent Covid-19 waves, and it was highly unprepared for distance learning. Closures in Spring 2020 affected schools at all levels, while in school year 2020-21 closures were differentiated by grade and region. This paper estimates the effect of a distance learning day and the overall effect of distance learning on primary and lower secondary school students at the national and regional level in Italy. We use INVALSI scores in Italian and Mathematics, and we count the distance learning days for primary and lower secondary schools at the regional level. The estimation rests on a fixed effects panel model with a second-degree polynomial of time. Results suggest that primary school students experienced small learning gains in Italian and some learning losses in Mathematics, and that lower secondary school students suffered sizable learning losses in Italian and Mathematics. The losses of older pupils were more than double the losses of younger pupils. The effect of distance learning differed largely across Regions. Unexpectedly, the Regions with the greatest losses were not necessarily those with the longest school closures.

ABSTRACT. Main aim of this paper is to investigate the existence of nonlinearity in the association between parents’ and descendants’ education. Using the Global Database of Intergenerational Mobility (2020) and the mixed seg- mented panel models, the results in this study show that a concave relation exists in educational transmissions for the countries in high and middle in- come groups. This occurs for all the combinations of gender for parents and descendants. Moreover,low and middle income countries are more con- strained then high income countries and daughters have higher educational persistence rates and are more constrained than sons. Mothers seem to be more important specially for sons due to lower value of change points.

ABSTRACT. Quality in tertiary education pays off. In countries with competitive tertiary education, elite flagship institutions attract high-achieving students. Not all bright students, however, access elite institutions. Can honors program be an alternative way to nurture talent? This paper studies the causal impact of attending an honors program offered to high achieving students at a nonselective university in a context with non-competitive tertiary institutions. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the program’s admission procedure, which leads to a strong discontinuity in the probability of admission and enrollment. We show the program works as both a recruitment device, increasing the probability of enrolling at the parent university, as well as a commitment device, reducing late graduation rates for admitted students. Moreover, enrolment into the program leads to a sizeable improvement in academic achievement (+0.53 GPA points on a scale of 30) and shapes future labour market prospects towards post graduate studies (+18 pp). Prospects are confirmed by an increase (+37 pp) in the proportion of graduates enrolled in PhD programs one year after graduation. We find that, while honors students from different backgrounds have different starting points in terms of academic achievements and prospects, they tend to converge by the end of the program. According to our findings, honors programs can be an effective tool to improve educational attainment and foster further human capital accumulation in talented students, mainly through an increase in transitions towards PhD programs

ABSTRACT. Students are admitted into higher education based on their past performance. This paper compares two measures of past cognitive skills: teacher and national exam scores. By using a nationwide dataset, we look at how the predictive power of teacher assessment and exam scores for selecting successful students may vary with the degree of selectivity of higher education programmes. We find that teacher scores predict students’ performance in higher education more accurately, and its predictive power remains the same independently of the selectivity programme indicator considered. We found that national exam scores are noisier and only gain relevance for highly selective programmes. Furthermore, we explore national exams’ volatility and institutional selectivity as potential mechanisms to justify the results. Our results provide solid policy hints on the role that high school scores and admission exams should have for access and performance in higher education.

ABSTRACT. We assess the effect of financial and in-kind aid programs on the location decision process of Italian university students. We build a unique dataset that combines data on students' enrollment and detailed information on need-based policies within the program Diritto allo studio universitario (DSU). We explicitly account for the heterogeneity in students' preferences for DSU policies by taking advantage of the Latent Class Logit model, which allows us to model systematic and random heterogeneity in preferences conditioned on students' individual characteristics. Our estimates for the elasticity of students' choices with respect to the different DSU policies emphasize the role of in-kind benefits availability -- such as places in dormitories -- as a key pull factor, especially for students with high secondary school grades. On the contrary, pure monetary services such as grants and rent support policies do not present a sizable effect. The results from a set of policy simulation exercises reveal that an increase in the provision of these services may encourage students from more peripheral areas to relocate to major university locations. However, they also highlight that these policies can be be used to counteract the out-migration of students from the southern to northern Italian regions.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, we assess the value of auditing the final high school grades on educational and labour market outcomes. We leverage a 2007 reform in Italy that introduced the presence of external examiners on the board. We compare treated and untreated cohorts in a two-way fixed effects model to show that the reform increased the earnings of high school graduates. We carry out two-way fixed effects and special regressor methods to prove that the reform raised the pupils’ years of schooling. We extend the combined fixed effects approach (Altonji and Zhong 2021) to attest that treated cohorts’ returns to graduation are about six percentage points as high as the untreated ones. Women benefited more than men from the reform. The reform led them to choose a different higher education path and opened up the doors to occupations and earnings they would not have earned absent it.

ABSTRACT. We characterize and empirically study the main sets of choice alternatives processed by families with an adolescent child prior to a consequential human capital decision: the choice of a high school track in presence of curricular specialization. Using rich survey data collected from a sample of Italian 8th graders and their parents during the months preceding high school track choice, we document substantial heterogeneity in size and composition of awareness, agency, and consideration sets at the time of preenrollment and trace the evolution of the sets' size and composition over the decision process. We investigate how the documented heterogeneity in choice-related sets varies with student and family characteristics, focusing on the role of parenting style and childparent interactions in shaping children's choice-related sets over the process of decisionmaking. We find that agents tend to expand their choice sets over time, but at the moment of choice families tend to have more concentrated preference on fewer alternatives listed as favorite and considered for the choice. We also detail how child's gender and GPA affect the size of these sets and their composition in terms of number of tracks covered.

ABSTRACT. The digital advertising tax is an increasingly used policy measure, but its consequences are not well understood. Our analysis of the newly introduced digital advertising tax in Maryland shows a significant decrease in firm value for the affected industry following the passing of the law. While the tax may increase state-level tax revenues, we highlight an unexplored drawback of this policy. The unilateral ability of each country to tax advertising revenues generated in their territories leads to inefficiently high equilibrium tax rates. Our findings emphasize the need for a global initiative on digital platform taxation rather than leaving the decision to individual countries.

ABSTRACT. This paper attempts to identify if the existence of high tax rates creates opportunity for profit shifting inside the sectors for three high income country groups (USA, Japan and Western Europe). To this end, the empirical analysis investigates the functional form in the association between profits and taxation using panel data for the firms aggregated in nine sectors. The preliminary result of the paper is that there may be a plausible inverted U-shaped relationship between the effective tax rate and profits. The policy implication is that if the marginal tax rate is higher than the threshold level, the firms may have incentive to declare less profits, shifting debt and risks to reduce the tax burden.

ABSTRACT. The Value-Added Tax (VAT) is widely recognized as inherently self-enforcing due to its third-party reporting mechanism, whose reliability relies on the opposite incentives of buyers and sellers, and its withholding mechanism, which distributes tax obligations across the production chain. However, a growing literature documents the significant impact of tax evasion on VAT, sparking interest in possible improvements to VAT design. One policy change recently implemented in (some sectors of) several countries is the Reverse Charge (RC), which shifts the VAT liability on the buyer in all business-to-business (B2B) transactions. The RC removes the withholding mechanism from VAT, effectively eliminating non-compliance incentives for intermediate firms, and shifts the entire tax payment on retailers, which remain subject to third-party reporting. The effectiveness of RC in improving compliance ultimately depends on the relative efficacy of tax enforcement in the B2B and B2C stages, with the additional consideration that “fake invoices” are ineffective under RC. Leveraging administrative firm-level data from Italy, we show that the RC resulted in an increase of reported value added (+17 percent), enhanced corporate profits and, in turn, corporate tax paid by treated firms. Finally, we show that RC improved access to credit. These findings suggest that targeted modifications to the standard VAT design, devised with an eye to the enforcement effectiveness along the production chain, might prove to be fruitful and should be looked at with interest.

ABSTRACT. In July 2020, the UK government reduced the VAT rate on hospitality services from 20\% to 5%, as response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We compile a novel dataset of detailed hotel room characteristics around this policy action in order to estimate how much the tax cut was passed on to consumers via a price reduction. We find a statistically significant contemporaneous pass-through to hotel room prices that varies between around 20% and 50%, with a peak effect on prices observed on the second week after the reform. However, the pass-through effect is short-lived and disappears two months after the policy introduction.

ABSTRACT. This article is the first comparative study at the European level that relies on an individual and country-level approach to investigate the mediating effect of country-level variables on the motherhood earnings penalty. Using the EU-SILC survey, we examine the earnings gap associated with motherhood in 13 Western European countries over the 2006-2018 period. We perform an empirical analysis that draws on average and distributional effects and deals with the endogeneity of the motherhood status to examine the existence, extent, and evolution of differences in earnings between mothers and childless women. The analysis reveals some eye-catching similarities in the qualitative effects of motherhood on women’s labor market outcomes across groups of countries and some differences in the magnitude of these effects. Overall, a motherhood-related penalty is observed in most countries. Nonetheless, a premium is observed in Greece and the Netherlands, and no statistically significant differences are observed in Belgium and France. The results show that the MEP decreases significantly along the earnings distribution, with a much more significant reduction at the bottom than at the top of the earnings distribution. These overall results hide some country-specificities that we highlight in the article. The aggregate analysis reveals that family-friendly policies do not successfully reduce the motherhood earnings penalty. Importantly, the MEP tends to be lower in countries that are more traditional in their attitudes toward women’s roles in both the private and public spheres. Lastly, higher minimum wages are associated with a reduction of the penalty as minimum wages tend to increase the earnings of mothers who are more likely to be segregated in the least remunerative segments of the labor market.

ABSTRACT. We investigate the link between research similarity and female presence in academia. Using data on the universe of job applications for tenure-track assistant professor positions in economics in Italy and exploiting NLP techniques (sentence embeddings) on the abstract of each publication of the scholars in our dataset, we calculate indices of similarity between candidates and members of selection committees. We show that the level of similarity is strongly associated with the winning probability. Moreover, while there are no gender differences in average similarity, women and men differ in terms of maximum similarity. This gender gap disappears when the similarity index is calculated only focusing on female members of the committee. The results suggest that similarity bias in male-dominated environments can have implications for gender diversity.

ABSTRACT. What is the role of gender on the political decision-making process regarding public early childcare provision? This work investigates whether the availability and expenditures of early childcare services in Italian municipalities is affected by the gender of the mayor (political supply) or by the presence of high shares of female workers in need of such services and acting as a pressure group to politicians (citizens' demand). The study uses a sharp RDD strategy in the context of closed mix-gender elections and an IV strategy to estimate the causal effect of gender on early childcare service provision. The findings indicate that female mayors in Italy do not provide more extensive early childcare provisions than their male counterparts. Conversely, the active presence of female workers appears to be pivotal in determining the availability of childcare spots and expenditures for children aged 0-3. Overall, the study highlights the importance of considering citizens' demand when analysing public service provision and suggests that gender plays a role in shaping policy choices.

ABSTRACT. Policy knowledge is a crucial component of democratic accountability. Yet, little is known about whether individuals are aware and knowledgeable of public policies, and on the determinants of policy literacy. We investigate general patterns of policy knowledge in the population focusing on the EU's Resilience and Recovery Plan (RRP), a €723 billion program designed to mitigate the socio-economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a uniquely tailored panel survey, we assess the level of public understanding concerning the RRP and identify important heterogeneity across socio-demographic groups. Preliminary findings suggest a limited level of policy knowledge; while 62\% of respondents report being aware of the RRP, when assessing more detailed knowledge, we detect much lower awareness about the plan's financial structure and timeline. Notably, we uncover a significant and persistent gender-based literacy gap. Female respondents are less likely to report to know the plan, and have much lower level of knowledge of its structure. Interestingly, this gap diminishes when the focus of the questions shift from financial details to policy reforms that are likely to be more relevant for female voters. Exploiting randomized exposure to the availability of the "i don't know" option, we show that gender differences in confidence fully explain overall knowledge gaps and gaps about specific measures, while they can't explain the difference in knowledge of the financial structure of the plan.

ABSTRACT. This research investigates the influence of the 17th Amendment on political discourse in the United States. Applying computational linguistic analysis to a dataset of 5,323,119 speeches made by voting members of Congress from 1879 to 1935, we trace the shifts in dialogue patterns. Post-Amendment, we observe significant changes in the tone, complexity, and focus of debate, indicating a tilt towards national issues, increased populist rhetoric, and a democratization of discourse. Our findings highlight the enduring impact of structural changes on political dialogue, offering insights into the dynamics of democratic representation.

ABSTRACT. This paper analyzes the effect of exposure to democracy during adolescence and early adulthood on the pro-EU attitude of the members of the European Parliament. Relying on the psychological theory of ‘impressionable years’, we test whether members exposed to less democratic regimes at the age of 18-25 have a higher probability of voting against pro-EU instances in the roll-call-voting of the first six legislatures, from 1979 to 2009. Our results suggest that exposure to democracy increases the probability of voting in favor of pro-EU policies by about 6%-16%, depending on the legislature. We find that the effect is stronger in votes with a significant cleavage on EU instances, while it is irrelevant in votes not involving EU instances. Our results take into account heterogeneity in political groups, country of election, year of birth, and legislature and resist several robustness checks.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this paper is understanding the reasons driving the outcomes presented in Franzoni (2023): an evidence of vertical split-ticket voting in favour of the center-left parties in municipality elections with respect to European elections. To do so - using the data-set elaborated in Franzoni (2023) - I explore several potential mechanisms that may generate such phenomenon. First through a correlation analysis I investigate persistent historical reasons; then, with a difference-in-differences approach citizens’ taxation and redistribution preferences; finally, thanks to a “difference-in-discontinuities” design the selection and handover of the local political class. The last hypothesis appears to be the more convincing to explain the split-ticket behaviour.

ABSTRACT. This paper shows that the so-called “Gentiloni pact”, a secret alliance between conservative legislators and the Catholic Church, provided electoral and legislative coordination to Italian conservatives after the 1912 franchise extension in Italy. Electorally, the pact successfully mobilized Catholic voters, increasing the share of conservative votes and the likelihood of removing left-wing incumbent MPs. On the legislative side, we introduce a new indicator to show that the pact increased the coordination among its signatories and successfully blocked reforms on divorce and family law. These findings illustrate a general point about the consequences of franchise extension: that it makes “moral public goods” a more effective electoral tool, hence increasing the importance of organizations (like religious organizations) which can credibly commit to their provision. This implies that, under some circumstances, franchise extensions may generate more conservative social policies rather than more progressive fiscal policies.

ABSTRACT. This paper studies both theoretically and empirically the linkage between civic sense and recycling activities in Italy related to the years 1998, 2012, 2018, 2019. In the theoretical framework, the goal is to build a link between civic sense concepts, steeped in components that are also psychological, and a typical traditional theoretical approach with perfectly rational and perfectly informed agents. Starting from a game-theoretic model of contribution with particular features related to the objective function of agents and a heterogeneity in their costs, the article wants to highlight how certain theoretical results collide with empirical evidence. As the theoretical investigation the empirical analysis, using the Multipurpose Household Survey conducted by the Italian Central Statistical Office and ordered probit models, shows a positive, robust and stable relationship between civic sense and household recycling activities.

ABSTRACT. Responsible investment is on the rise and cannot be explained solely by standard utilitarian behaviour. Morality rules have already been applied to consumption and voluntary provision of public goods, but no attempts have been made at modelling moral investments. In this paper we develop a model of ethical investment driven by Kantian morality. We derive a first best (Pareto Efficient) asset pricing relation, which contains a pollution premium. This asset pricing relation is contrasted with those of Kantian equilibria, and the consequences for equilibrium pollution are shown. We also analyse the role of wealth inequality and preference heterogeneity on portfolio holdings. We show that when all investors (even if heterogeneous) are Kantian, the equilibrium is Pareto efficient, i.e. the externality is internalised. We next analyse the situation when only a fraction of the population is Kantian. Under Inclusive Kantianism the equilibrium may generate less pollution than what is Pareto Efficient, while under Exclusive Kantianism the equilibrium is characterised by excess pollution.

ABSTRACT. This study aims to examine the factors that affect individuals' Self-Reported Ability to Reduce Energy Use in a sample of Europeans. Using data from the European Social Survey (ESS) – round 8 (2016), we conducted an OLS to analyze the relationships between self-reported ability to reduce energy use and risk and trust attitudes. The results indicate that trust, particularly trust in politicians, and risk attitudes are significant factor in shaping individuals' self-reported energy reduction feasibility. Overall, this study suggests that risk and trust may be an important factor influencing household energy consumption.

ABSTRACT. How could firms best reduce their environmental impact? Should they change technology? Or could they do better with what they already have? This paper shows that one size does not fit all. We employ a mixture model estimation to dissect environmental efficiency into a technology adoption component (what type of technology is used) and a technology usage component (how a technology is used). For a sample of plants covered by the EU ETS, we find that the share of plants adopting frontier technologies is about 21%. We also find that the average environmental efficiency gains that plants could reach by improving technology adoption and technology usage are 75% and 80% respectively. The analysis of balance-sheet data on parent companies reveals that better environmental technologies are adopted by larger, listed, multi-plant and international companies, while older firms and firms with higher intangible assets intensity more commonly show improved technology usage.

ABSTRACT. This paper studies the effects of ethnic favoritism on the allocation of public goods, using transportation infrastructure investment in Ethiopia as a case study. The unique institu- tionalization of ethnicity in Ethiopia provides an interesting context to investigate this phe- nomenon. By analyzing a comprehensive historical roads panel dataset at the grid cell-level between 1969-2016, the study shows that co-ethnicity with the ethnic elite of the government results in a higher allocation of non-excludable goods, specifically roads. Using coarsened exact matching and difference-in-differences, the study shows that Tigray-dominated cells receive 12% more road investments and a 15% higher improvement in pavement quality. The indirect welfare effects of road investments are also explored, with a 47% increase in road infrastructure investment observed in Tigray-dominated cells within 10km distance from schools and health services. This leads to a 49% increase in weighted speed and significant improvements in the Rural Access Index. Additionally, the impact of road infrastructure de- velopment on economic activity and night lights is analyzed using instrumental variables and a staggered difference-in-differences approach. The findings highlight that those cells exposed to an increase in road infrastructure experience a one-third standard deviation increase in night lights, with Tigray-dominated cells experiencing a higher increase. We conclude that ethnic favouritism is not deterred by a multi-ethnic governmental setup, and that asymmetries in public goods allocations could be one of the determinants of ethnic tensions in Ethiopia.

ABSTRACT. What is the role of the militarization of law enforcement agencies in affecting protest activity in the US? This paper shows that transfers of military equipment from the Department of Defense through the 1033 Program increased the incidence of protests in a given county in 2020. Our results are driven by demonstrations related to the Black Lives Matter movement, with the increase in protests after the killing of George Floyd in May 2020 four times larger in militarized counties when compared to non-militarized ones. Hence, our results highlight how the recent wave of protests is directly linked to the hotly debated 1033 Program, largely responsible for the excessive militarization of local law enforcement agencies in the past decades.

ABSTRACT. Does exposure to war violence affect individuals’ willingness to comply with the tax law? Using newly digitized historical administrative records on individual tax declarations in Italy’s aftermath of World War I, we find that having a family member who died on the battlefield significantly decreases tax compliance. To account for potential endogeneity of the treatment, we use an instrumental variable strategy exploiting the exogenous allocation of soldiers to more/less risky military units. Our findings are consistent with the idea that war can undermine individuals’ trust in the state, reducing their willingness to contribute to public goods via the tax system.

ABSTRACT. We study the effect of a foreign military intervention in Mali on citizens’ motivations to participate in state building processes. We exploit the random- ness of the announcement of the United Nations’ resolution, that authorized the intervention, relative to the timeline of the Afrobarometer interviews. Comparing motivations between individuals that responded the days after the foreign intervention was announced and individuals, with same character- istics, region, and ethnic group, that responded the days before, we document a sharp and long-lived increase in Malians’ motivations to pay taxes. Our results indicate that foreign military interventions may signal state building, increasing motivations to participate.

ABSTRACT. We introduce a notion of fairness, inspired by the equality of opportunity liter- ature, into many-to-one matching markets endowed with a measure of the quality of a match between two entities in the market. In this framework, fairness consid- erations are made by a social evaluator based on the match quality distribution. We investigate the compatibility between our notion of fairness, a notion of ef-  ciency based on aggregate match quality, and the standard notion of stability. To overcome some of the identi ed incompatibilities, we propose two alternative approaches. The  rst one is a linear programming solution to maximize fairness under stability constraints. The second approach weakens fairness and e ciency to de ne a class of opportunity egalitarian social welfare functions that evaluate stable matchings. We then describe an algorithm to  nd the stable matching that maximizes social welfare.

ABSTRACT. We extend part of the fundamental theorem on the inequality measurement due to Hardy, Littlewood and Polya (HLP, 1934) to the multidimensional case of households that differ in several characteristics and have different size and weight.

ABSTRACT. This paper provides a robust criterion for comparing lists of probability distributions - interpreted as allocations of opportunities - faced by different social groups. Borrowing from decision making under objective ambiguity, we argue in favour of comparing those collections of probability distributions on the basis of a uniform - among groups - valuation of the expected utility associated to these distributions. We identify an empirically implementable criterion for comparing these lists of probability distributions - conic extension of zonotope inclusion - that is agreed upon by all conceivable such valuations that exhibit aversion toward inequality of opportunities. We illustrate our criterion by evaluating allocations of educational opportunities among castes and genders in different Indian states.

ABSTRACT. We develop dominance criteria to assess the patterns of residential ethnic segregation and urban income deprivation across neighborhoods of a city. The results combine aggregate information on inequality and residential segregation within neighborhoods and disparities across neighborhoods in average incomes. We use this methodology to investigate the dynamic of these phenomena in four American Metropolitan Statistical Areas from 1990 to 2012.

ABSTRACT. Recent literature found an age bias in the recruitment process of new employees, particularly relevant for older women. Using data from the Survey on Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, the present paper investigates on the relationship between having undergone work interruptions during the first wave of the Pandemic and the employment situation of the individuals aged 50 or above, one year and a half later. Our results indicate that work disruptions are associated with larger probabilities of ending up unemployed, retired or out of the labour force. Women were more likely to become homemakers while individuals with good IT skills displayed significantly lower probabilities of unemployment.

ABSTRACT. How do legislative reductions in hours impact firms? In this paper, we use matched employer-employee data to evaluate a policy reform in Portugal that unexpectedly reduced the usual weekly working hours from 44 to 40 hours. Using a difference-in-differences approach that exploits initial heterogeneity across collective agreements covering workers, we show that the reform led to a significant drop in working hours in treated firms, while salaries did not adjust, resulting in higher wages per hour. We observe only a small and insignificant negative effect on employment, as treated firms are able to maintain or even increase sales despite the fall in labor input (total hours worked within a firm). We show that this partly reflects higher prices rather than higher (or constant) volumes, whereby firms are able to shift the higher labor costs onto consumers

ABSTRACT. Gli incentivi alle imprese per la realizzazione di attività legate alla ricerca e sviluppo rappresentano uno dei punti cardine della politica economica a sostegno delle imprese degli ultimi anni. Le misure, le forme e le modalità di fruizione degli incentivi hanno subito numerose e sostanziali modifiche nel corso del tempo. In Italia, come in altri paesi OCSE, le politiche fiscali, a complemento dei sussidi diretti, sono state impiegate in misura crescente per incentivare la spesa in R&S delle imprese e sostenere l’innovazione. Questo lavoro prende in esame gli strumenti di incentivazione fiscale a favore delle imprese innovative introdotti negli ultimi anni, il credito d’imposta alla R&S e il Patent Box. Il credito d’imposta per investimenti in ricerca e sviluppo (R&S) è un’agevolazione fiscale, introdotta nel 2015 e rivista a più riprese, riservata alle imprese di qualsiasi forma giuridica che ha come obiettivo lo stimolo dell’innovazione e della competitività. Nel 2020, il credito R&S è stato modificato sostituendo il meccanismo commisurato all’incremento della spesa effettuata con un nuovo regime che agevola l’intero ammontare di spesa in R&S. La legge di Bilancio 2021 aveva incrementato il beneficio previsto per il 2020. La legge di Bilancio 2022, pur riconfermando la misura fino al 2031, la depotenzia significativamente a partire dal 2023. Per il quadriennio 2020-23, relativamente alle imprese operanti nelle regioni del Mezzogiorno è riconosciuta una maggiorazione del credito. Il Patent box, invece, è stato introdotto nel nostro ordinamento come strumento per contrastare la competizione fiscale con altri paesi, riducendo inizialmente il prelievo fiscale sui profitti generati dai beni intangibili (brevetti). In quanto tale, esso non si prefigge come obiettivo il contenimento ex-ante del rischio intrinseco delle attività di R&S, essendo eligibili per l’agevolazione solo gli investimenti che hanno avuto successo. Anche il Patent Box in vigore deriva da una completa revisione operata nel 2021 (legge 146/2021) del previgente meccanismo agevolativo introdotto dalla legge di stabilità 2015. A differenza della precedente normativa che consisteva nella tassazione agevolata del reddito derivante dall’utilizzo di uno o più beni immateriali per i quali è stata svolta attività di R&S, il nuovo regime agevolativo consiste in una super-deduzione ai fini delle imposte sui redditi dei costi di R&S sostenuti a ritroso fino a otto anni antecedenti alla registrazione del brevetto. Lo studio contribuisce alla letteratura esistente in due direzioni. In primo luogo, si valuta l’impatto delle variazioni normative sul carico fiscale delle imprese attraverso l’utilizzo delle aliquote forward-looking, quali l’aliquota media effettiva (EATR) e il B-index, indicatori che stimano gli effetti delle misure fiscali in un’ottica prospettica, tenendo conto degli elementi che contribuiscono alla definizione del costo effettivo dell’investimento. In particolare, nel calcolo degli indicatori si tiene conto delle possibili combinazioni tra credito R&S e Patent Box consentite dalla normativa. In secondo luogo, si offre un confronto degli effetti dei diversi regimi sui profili distributivi delle imprese beneficiarie degli aiuti sulla base delle dichiarazioni fiscali per il periodo d’imposta 2015-2020 per l’universo delle società di capitali (circa 900 mila società in ciascun periodo d’imposta).

ABSTRACT. This paper aims to identify the potential influence of financial literacy’s marginal change on households’ income (wealth) inequality levels both at the mean value and along with the distribution. Using data from the Bank of Italy Survey of Households Income and Wealth (SHIW)’s 2016 wave – which includes the Big Three questions, a widely used measure of financial literacy - we show that replacing 10% of respondents reporting no correct answers with respondents reporting two correct answers out of three would increase the mean value of the household equivalized disposable income by 0.8% (160€ per year). Additionally, it would increase by +1.5% (285€ per year) if we replace 10% of respondents reporting no correct answers with those reporting three correct answers. These results are not trivial. A lump sum leading to the same household income increase would cost on average EUR 4.1 to 7.3 billion per year in Italy. Finally, heterogeneous analysis reveals that an increase in financial literacy levels often engenders a greater reduction of inequality levels among the most vulnerable groups. Our preliminary cost analysis supports mandatory financial education in schools.

ABSTRACT. This paper studies whether and how awareness of and access to financial markets can, together with public redistribution, appropriately smooth welfare across individuals and households. First, it develops a theoretical model where individual ignorance reduces access to financial markets, and creates inequality through lack of diversification or mistakes that redistribute randomly. Second, it exploits data on financial literacy and resilience of Italian households during the Covid-19 pandemic, to test the model predictions. Preliminary results confirm the model’s prediction that financial literacy can provide risk protection to individuals and households in the face of aggregate shocks.

ABSTRACT. Drawing on individual data from 82 countries over the 1981–2021 period, this paper sheds light on potential limitations of exploring the impact of the income distribution’s shape on trust, using — as traditional in the literature — a single inequality indicator. Results suggest that aggregate income inequality and institutional trust are positively associated but they hide some troubling countervailing effects. When the whole profile of inequality is considered, institutional trust is negatively related to inequality between different income groups in the society whereas it is positively associated with inequality within those income groups. Despite some heterogeneities due to the country’s level of development and individual preferences for redistribution, the profile of inequality always matters. Thus, this paper indicates that limiting the analysis to one single inequality aggregator would only capture an average effect and hide a more complex underlying nexus between income distribution and trust in public institutions.

ABSTRACT. The emerging literature on social discontent argues that left behind areas are more likely to vote for anti-system parties. Evidence from the US and Europe identify left behind areas with rural contexts. We argue that it is the level of institutional trust that triggers discontent. As such, we focus in Latin America and employ survey data from the 2019 Latin American Public Opinion Project. We find that institutional trust is higher in rural than in urban areas. Our aim is to assess whether urban/rural-based differences in institutional trust primarily result from differences in observable attributes (composition effect) or from differences in returns of otherwise equivalent characteristics, and therefore we apply the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition approach. Our evidence highlights that the largest part of the different levels of trust in urban and rural areas are due to differences in the levels of income (and education) in the two contexts as well as in the changes in income levels. This is coherent with distinctive socio-economic dynamics characterising Latin America in the last years. A large part of a new social group, mainly residing in urban areas, is frustrated in their aspiration to class transition after the end of the commodity price boom and generous public spending programmes. This group has lower institutional trust, and is more likely to express discontent.

ABSTRACT. We study whether a better knowledge of the functioning of pay-as-you-go pension systems and recent demographic trends in the hosting country affects natives’ attitudes towards immigration. In two online experiments in Italy and Spain, we randomly treated participants with a video explaining how, in pay-as-you-go pension systems, the payment of current pensions depends on the contributions paid by current workers. The video also explains that the ratio between the number of pensioners and the number of workers in their countries will grow substantially in the future. We find that the treatment improves participants’ knowledge about how a pay-as-you-go system works and the future demographic trends in their country. However, we find that only treated participants who do not support populist and anti-immigrant parties display more positive attitudes towards migrants, even though the treatment increases knowledge of pension systems and demographic trends for all participants.

ABSTRACT. In Experimental Economics, coordination games are used to elicit social norms as incentivized beliefs about others' beliefs. Conversely, representative surveys like the World Values Survey elicit social norms as personal attitudes and values that are independent of others' beliefs. Using a representative survey of the Italian population (N=1,501), we compare the two ways of measuring social norms with gender roles as a working example and find the following results. At the aggregated level, appropriateness ratings obtained under the two elicitation methods follow the same pattern but differ significantly in magnitude, with the incentivized social norm elicitation depicting a more conservative view on gender roles than the unincentivized one. The analysis carried out at the individual level allows us to explain the previous result. Most respondents report personal values as more progressive than the perceived norm, which may be consistent with a desirability and/or a self-image bias. This occurs irrespectively of whether respondents correctly perceive the social norm or not. We conclude that analyses based on personal values lead to a proxy of gender norms significantly more progressive than the norms elicited in coordination games.

ABSTRACT. We conduct a survey experiment with around four thousand German respondents and provide them with information on either one of two gender inequality measures or on both of them: gender gap in earnings and gender gap in pensions. We analyze the effect of information provision on respondents’ views over gender inequality being a key issue and on their agreement with the adoption of different policies targeting different stages of the life cycle and aimed at reducing gaps. We find that providing information changes the perception of the importance of reducing gender inequality. Being informed on both gaps has the largest impact on the agreement with the adoption of reform measures and makes respondents more favorable towards policies increasing female labor supply rather than those compensating women during the retirement period. Information provision has slightly more sizable effects on women and on younger respondents.

ABSTRACT. We investigate the impact of public procurement on business survival. Using Italy as a laboratory, we construct a large-scale dataset of firms—covering balance-sheet, income-statement, and administrative records—and match it with public contract data. Employing a regression discontinuity design for close-call auctions, we find that winners are more likely to stay in the market than marginal losers after the award and that the boost in survival chances lasts longer than the contract duration. We document that this effect is associated with earnings substitution rather than increased business scale. Regardless of size, contracts that are long-lasting and awarded by decentralized buyers are more impactful for survival prospects. Survivors experience no productivity premium but rather an improvement in their credit position.

ABSTRACT. Il lavoro affronta il tema dell'efficienza temporale nella realizzazione delle opere pubbliche in Italia, offrendo un'analisi della durata delle fasi del ciclo di vita dei progetti infrastrutturali che tiene conto di fattori collocati su più dimensioni: quella procedurale, quella dell'efficienza dell'ente appaltante e dell'esperienza dell'impresa aggiudicataria, quella dei fattori territoriali. Utilizzando i risultati della stima di modello di durata parametrico a rischi non proporzionali proponiamo una lettura comparativa delle performances, articolata su più profili di attori pubblici e di infrastrutture, che consente di prospettare l'impatto delle riforme di settore previste nell'ambito del PNRR.

ABSTRACT. This paper studies how severe weather events (SWEs) affect the awarding procedures of public procurement contracts. We draw on a large dataset of Italian public procurement tenders for the construction and the maintenance of buildings and roads in the period 2008-2021. We find that municipalities previously hit by SWEs during the execution of procurement works are more likely to adopt procurement procedures that give them discretion in the selection of participating firms. When the firm winning the contract has already worked with the municipality in the past, such discretion reduces the likelihood of time overruns in work completion. Relational contracts aimed at overcoming the contractual incompleteness caused by SWEs can explain the previous findings. In a simple theoretical setting, we show that the public buyer can reward firms that handled past SWEs well by selecting them as participants in future tenders.

ABSTRACT. While the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic saw the Italian government adopt a strategy of strict containment measures (lockdown) to stop the spread of the virus, the second one saw it apply a regional division into colored zones with differentiated restrictions, depending on the specific local pandemic risk. The aim of this paper is to analyze whether in addition to health reasons, some political motivations, such as the will of increasing mobility inflows and outflows, could affect pandemic restrictions based on regions’ colors. The idea underlying the paper is that, if no political reasons affect the decision of applying restrictions, the probability for a certain region to obtain a particular color shall depend only on factors concerning public health and included by law as factors influencing the color of the region. By applying a probit model to a regional panel, some clues of political manipulation emerge.

ABSTRACT. Limited research has explored the role of health care decision makers, and their links with the medical industry as well as its wider corporatist incentives. Although medical political decision makers in policy can bring experience and exhibit first-hand knowledge to navigate the health system, they are liable to be captured by the industry and to serve corporatist interests (e.g., increase doctors wages). However, empirical evidence of such effects is scarce, and cross-country analysis is limited because health system decision making is often a subcentral responsibility. This paper draws on the natural experiment that results from the decentralization of health care responsibilities in Italy and Spain, two unitary states that underwent similar processes of fiscal and political health care decentralization, which allows for controlling for common cross-country institutions. We build an original dataset on the characteristics of regional health ministers for both countries for the years 1996-2021. Controlling for information on regional characteristics (income, demographics, alongside the time structure of the data), alongside personal characteristics of regional health minister in both countries (age, gender, political affiliation), we identify the effect of a medical doctor acting as regional minister. We also differentiate medical doctors from past hospital managers and professional politicians. We find evidence of higher per capita health care expenditures resulting from a medical doctor’s minister as well as some differences in expenditure composition (e.g. a lower spending on private health care is observed when medical doctors serve as regional health ministries). Looking at appropriateness indicators, we find an higher rate of C-sections resulting from a medical doctor’s minister. However, we do not find differences in health care outcomes such as health system satisfaction. Association between personal and political features of the incumbent and outcomes during Covid-19 is being explored.

ABSTRACT. The paper investigates the link between pro-environment parties and environmental policy outcomes at the municipal level in Italy for the years 2010‐2021. We investigate whether mayors supported by pro-environment parties or civic lists manage to increase the share of recycled waste and spend more on several environmental outcomes, compared to non-pro-environmental mayors. Exploiting close elections in a regression discontinuity framework we detect a sizable and statistically significant increase in the share of recycling rates in municipalities run by a pro-environmental coalition when considering mayors professedly green. However, this impact vanishes when considering less-restrictive definitions of green mayoral candidate. At the same time, there is no evidence that pro-environmental mayors increase the budget for environmental expenditure and waste collection.

ABSTRACT. Using survey data, we contribute to the literature on temporal evolution of educational attainment by parental background by providing the estimates of the intergenerational education mobility in Italian regions across seven birth cohorts. Results of intergenerational correlation between parents and children’s education show that in the last fifty years mobility increased in almost all regions, although for the youngest cohorts this decline seems to have ended. Northeast regions and Central regions are the most mobile, followed by Northwest and South regions. This pattern is robust to alternative measures of relative mobility. As expected, we find that - at least for the youngest cohorts - there is a negative correlation between mobility and economic factors such as unemployment and poverty. This suggests that credit constraints explain bottom tail persistence in education. A positive correlation between the intergenerational education mobility and the degree of inequality as measured by the GINI coefficient exists across Italian regions, consistent with the “Great Gatsby curve” documented across countries. In addition, we find a positive association between mobility, indexes of social capital and the number of graduates in the regions. Measures of school quality (PISA test) are positively correlated with regional educational mobility.

ABSTRACT. The effort exerted by parents and their parenting style are crucial determinants of children's human capital development. This paper refers to the inequality of opportunity literature that centers on disparities between social types defined by exposure to circumstances outside individual control. We adopt a latent class approach to identify the relevant types of family, expressed as a specific combination of a wide array of circumstance indicators, such as parenting style, family human capital and structure, and parental home-based involvement in their children's school activities. Then, we evaluate the extent to which children’s cognitive skills, social skills, mental and physical health outcomes vary by latent family type and examine the inequality of opportunity in children’s human capital development.

ABSTRACT. Using pre-pandemic data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS), and pandemic data from the UKHLS COVID-19 survey, this work aims firstly at using the models that preserve the ordinal nature of data to measure in England and Scotland the overall health inequality in the pandemic context, and secondly the parametric approach to measure the portion of inequalities due to circumstances. The findings show that within UK regions, overall health inequalities decrease during the pandemic, while the absolute measure of the inequality of health opportunities remains stable in both regions. Between UK regions, health inequalities are greater in Scotland than in England in both periods, especially in November 2020. Considering these different results within and between regions, the second aim of the work is to assess whether the trends in health inequalities could be related with the differing national implementation of the second lockdown policy of “Stay-at-home”, also looking at the heterogeneous effect by gender. The findings show that with the second lockdown policy the probability of being in the highest health status categories decreases in England by 10 pp, and the policy impact is higher for women than men.

ABSTRACT. We investigate the relationships between tax evasion, public debt stability, and welfare in a general equilibrium production economy model with productivity-enhancing public expenditure. We solve the model for its competitive equilibrium and show that it features stable and unstable equilibria. The possibility of evading taxes shrifts the debt-to-GDP levels of the stable (unstable) equilibrium upward (downward), thereby shrinking the length of the stability region that separates them. Optimal fiscal policies may be compatible with a positive level of tax evasion, even when auditing is costless. This effect is more likely to occur in economies with a (relatively) high productivity.

ABSTRACT. The paper uses an OLG model to study the interaction between policies designed to ensure the sustainability of the pension system, i.e. child allowances and pensions policies, and grandparental childcare. We find that the rise in grandparenting negatively affects the elderly labour supply hampering the impact of pension policies designed to raise the retirement age and lengthen working lives. Then we introduce child allowances and find that the impact of child allowances on fertility rate is influenced by the efficiency of grandparenting in reducing child-rearing costs. Child benefits have a positive impact on fertility only if grandparenting is not very effective at reducing childcare costs. This suggests that the role of grandparents in various countries may partly explain the inconsistency in empirical evidence on the relationship between child benefits and fertility rates. The study also finds that child benefits have a positive impact on the elderly labour supply when grandparenting is efficient.

ABSTRACT. Individual preferences over public policies should ideally be based on the possession of correct information about their reality. To test whether this holds, we conducted four waves of a survey, every six months since May 2020 (still under the COVID-19-lockdown), asking basic macro questions regarding the level of tax burden, of public debt, and of the underground economy in Spain. The percentage of correct responses (defined within broad ranges) never reaches 35%, and it is by far lowest for public debt. For the tax burden, left-wing individuals (with respect to right-wing) make more errors, and highly educated people (with respect to the rest of society) make fewer. No clear deterministic patterns arise for public debt and for the underground economy. Independently of the percentage of errors, we infer the existence of relative biases across different social characteristics: highly educated people tend to undervalue the level of the tax burden and of the underground economy and overvalue the level of public debt; leftist individuals undervalue the level of the tax burden and of the public debt but overvalue the level of the underground economy. There are also significant gender biases: with respect to men, women overvalue the tax burden and the importance of the underground economy, and undervalue the level of public debt. This misinformation and biases correlate with the marginal willingness to pay taxes (MWTP). MWTP is 10% higher under the presence of misinformation. This is particularly so for those individuals who undervalue the real level of the tax burden. Although COVID-19 generates greater interest to obtain information, including about fiscal issues, there is a decrease in its knowledge. The pandemic seems to have produced an excess of information up to causing misinformation. We also observe a general tendency to undervalue the level of public debt provoked by the exposure to COVID-19, which might be caused by the lax fiscal policy carried out during the pandemic.

ABSTRACT. This paper provides a new theory of tax evasion under the conjecture that the optimal choice to evading is constrained by agents’ portfolio technologies. The notion is that the choice to evade involves the use of specific production technologies (hidden technologies) whose return differs from that on technologies more strictly requiring tax payment (visible technologies). As the nature of agents’ accessible technologies mutates (hidden towards visible) and/or the return gap on these technologies’ changes, the optimal level of tax evasion changes, furthermore, the reaction of individuals to changes in tax burden is also influenced both by the technological gap and the return of each production technology. Following these arguments, the paper finds that the aggregate level of tax evasion depends on the average nature of technologies in the economy as well as on the level of the tax rate. The main result is that, also taking into account social customs and holding a positive relationship between tax rate and tax evasion, the latter depends on the relative returns on production technologies, thus providing an explanation for why some countries enjoy a different level of tax evasion despite having the same level of taxation, or even, the amount of tax evasion is lower in highly taxed countries.

ABSTRACT. Over the last 30 years, the number of studies on different types of tax expenditures has gradually increased in most OECD countries: given their importance for tax systems, most countries have decided to estimate revenue issues on a regular basis. Most of these studies have looked at issues such as the loss of tax revenue due to tax expenditures and their distributional effects across income groups. Surprisingly, no specific studies have been carried out on the rationale to attribute a composite criterion of fiscal sustainability and inter-territorial equity, in order to monitor over the years the performance of each item in relation to the public budget. In this paper a first empirical attempt is proposed in the Italian context. For each tax detraction, a composite indicator is calculated for the dimensions of progressivity, relevance and territorial equity, in order to highlight an objective criterion useful for rationalising tax expenditure. Our analysis shows that there is room for rationalisation in the number and size of tax expenditures facing a clear correlation between the geographical distribution of some tax expenditures.

ABSTRACT. This paper aims at studying the voting behaviour of Italian of Italian MPs in the early years after Unification. MPs were drawn from a homogeneous social class of landowners, civil servants, entrepreneurs, and professionals. They represented a homogeneous group of voters, since at the time of Unification only 2 percent of the population was enfranchised. MPs were elected under majoritarian rule in relatively small constituencies. We have collected data on personal characteristics of the MPs and their constituencies to analyse how they voted on a number of economic issues (fiat money, cereal taxation, income taxation, tax collection and land taxation) during the 10th Parliament of the Kingdom of Italy (1867-1870).

ABSTRACT. Administrative borders shape economic and social interactions and thus have a direct impact on culture, identity, and ultimately growth. This paper analyzes the effect on local economic development of a policy that redrew municipal boundaries in Italy. During the fascist regime – between 1927 and 1930 – about 20% of all Italian municipalities were amalgamated. By exploiting quasi-random variation in the probability of a merger between two (or more) municipalities, we show that amalgamated municipalities deviate from the counterfactual trend and exhibit a sustained and persistent decrease in population. We interpret this result as evidence that the potential efficiency gains in the provision of public goods were more than offset by the costs induced by the (forced) amalgamation of agents with heterogeneous preferences.

ABSTRACT. Disease and epidemics have been a constant presence throughout the history of humanity. In order to mitigate the risks of contagion, societies have long “adapted” to diseases, implementing an array of coping strategies that, in the long run, have had considerable economic and social consequences. This article advances the hypothesis, and documents empirically, that the need to alleviate the dangers of malaria shaped all aspects of life in agricultural communities, from where and how people settled, to how and what they could farm. As larger farms were better equipped to adopt these risk-mitigating strategies, centuries of exposure to malaria had important implications for inequality and wealth distribution.

ABSTRACT. We study the impact that participation in the Erasmus program produces on a number of labor market outcomes. By implementing a Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design, we show that participating in the international mobility program positively affects the probability of being employed three years after graduation and reduces the time spent to find a job, whereas no significant effect is found on the likelihood of getting a job in line with the qualification acquired. These results are mainly driven by male and STEM graduates. We further investigate potential mechanisms underlying our results and find that spending a period of time studying abroad improves both the proficiency in spoken English and graduates’academic performance, and tends to increase the willingness to move to find a job.

ABSTRACT. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact on the performance of young graduates in the labor market of individual skills acquired by measuring these last through an innovative approach. Instead of using for ex-post measurement of a defined set of competencies, we use a detailed dataset of student’s individual careers and build indicators of competencies by exploiting the information of students’ performance in the different types of teaching, grouped by macro-area: law, languages, mathematics, marketing and management and so on. The differential performance in the different identified domains turns out to have very significant effects that allow to identification the most rewarding competencies and validate the measurement approach.

ABSTRACT. Western countries' governments have recently raised the requirements for retirement; however, how older workers respond to new rules is still an important issue and even more for women, who usually experience discontinuous careers and have lower labour market attachment. This paper assesses the effect of a pension reform implemented in Italy in 2011, which unexpectedly and substantially increased the statutory retirement age (SRA), on women's retirement behaviour and wealth. The analysis uses administrative data from the National Social Security Institute and is based on a Regression Discontinuity (RD) and a Regression Discontinuity Differences-in-Differences (RD-DD) design. Identification exploits the facts that (i) women with a number of years of contributions just above specific thresholds are eligible for old age retirement or early retirement; (ii) women born in 1952 are the first cohort affected by the SRA increase, while women born in 1951 are unaffected. The results indicate that women affected by the pension reform, for whom SRA increased from age 60 to age 64 unexpectedly, are more likely to anticipate retirement when they have more than 35 years of contribution. As this option entails a penalization in the annuity, we also assess the reform's effect on the women's pension amount. The results (though preliminary) indicate that there is a reduction in the annuity, but the evidence is not statistically significant.

ABSTRACT. The paper explores the impact that legal restrictions on pharmacy licences have on hospitalizations. We draw on the reform approved in 2012 in Italy, which increased by 8% the number of pharmacies allowed to operate in the national territory. We set up a regression discontinuity design exploiting individual data covering the universe of hospitalizations in public and private Italian hospitals since 2010. We find that an 8% increase in the number of pharmacies led to a decrease in medical hospitalizations of 1.1% and in related expenditures of 1.3%. These drops are mainly driven by short hospitalizations of children and elderly individuals. We do not find any impact on our control group of surgical hospitalizations, and we validate the results with a battery of placebo tests. Pharmacies appear to reduce hospitalizations by providing information to people who would otherwise be admitted to hospital; other mechanisms are not supported by the data. Relaxing restrictions on the number of pharmacies is a powerful policy instrument to contain the rising of healthcare expenditure

ABSTRACT. Gambling disorders are highly costly for societies. A way to contain this phenomenon consists of increasing access costs to users by cutting the number of slot machines. Is this effective in reducing expenditure on gambling? We exploit the case of Italy, where a bill mandated the reduction in the number of slot machines in 2017. We show that the cut in devices is accompanied by an increase in expenditure on gambling. However, this is not due to substitution into other types of gambling. We discuss possible explanations of such unintended effect based on overconfidence and risk-loving behaviour.

ABSTRACT. This paper provides novel evidence on the impact of a cost-containment measure first introduced in Italy in 2007 – Piani di Rientro sanitari (PdRs) – on the performance and efficiency of Regional Health Services (RHSs). Thus far, ten out of twenty-one RHSs have undergone at least one round of recovery plans (RPs), three of them managed to exit, but seven are still under PdRs.

Recent advancements in Diff-in-Diff literature are exploited to retrieve a consistent estimator of the treatment effect on health-related outcomes in a context with i) potential violation of the classical common trend assumption, ii) treatment turning on and off at different points in time, iii) and treatment effect heterogeneity. Different bootstrap procedures are also used, which may lead to improved finite-sample inference in a context with few (treated) clusters.

On average, there is evidence that recovery plans managed to reduce costs. However, cost reduction was not followed by a boost in the efficiency of RHSs and the appropriateness of care provided, as expected by the policy-maker. Conversely, reduced budgets made available to regions only resulted in an unintended deterioration in the quality of healthcare services. Results are robust to a set of bounded-variations assumptions (Manski and Pepper, 2018).

ABSTRACT. What is the impact of the reverse-charge mechanism (RCM) in the application of the value-added tax (VAT) on the VAT gap, defined as the overall difference between expected and realized VAT revenues? The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effect of RCM's implementation on VAT revenues using a broader measure than those previously employed that captures VAT fraud stemming from both domestic and cross-border transactions, the VAT gap. First, we exploit the staggered adoption of RCM by individual member states to compare changes in the VAT gap before and after RCM implementation. To account for heterogeneous policy effects, we introduce an additional layer of variation coming from the size of economic activity of industries targeted by RCM in individual member states in the year prior to its policy implementation. We contribute additional evidence to the pre-existing literature quantifying the impact of the RCM on VAT fraud with a measure not previously employed, the VAT gap, while our identification strategy incorporates methodological advances pertinent to the heterogeneous nature of the RCM implementation by each member state that permit a causal interpretation of our study findings.

ABSTRACT. In the European Union energy is sold across large bidding zones, which, in most cases coincide with national borders. Other jurisdictions, such as the restructured markets in the United States, Australia and New Zealand, employ the so-called nodal (or locational) markets. The difference lies essentially in the granularity, insofar price formation in a zonal market happens at a more macro level than in nodal markets. Which one is the preferred system in terms of welfare? We show, firstly with a numerical example and then with an econometric approach, that the switch from zonal to nodal pricing system determines different prices that better reflect transmission scarcity, therefore implying an increase in welfare. We exploit the market re-configuration in Sweden that took place on November 2011, when the single Swedish bidding zone was split into four smaller zones and we show that prices increase where the zonal market implies an excess of demand and decrease where there is an excess of supply. We use panel data from the NordPool market and we perform a Regression Discontinuity in Time (RDiT) to compare change in prices in the Northern and Southern areas. We estimate that the re-configuration increased prices in the South by 1.7% while decreased prices in the North by 3.9%. These results reflect the lower production costs in the Northern area where more than 95% of electricity produced comes from hydroelectric plants.

ABSTRACT. Turnover is a key indicator of economic activity, but we know little about how much entrepreneurs adjust it as a response to taxation. This is because business taxation is usually based on profits, rather than turnover. This paper exploits the notch created by the eligibility cut-off of the preferential (turnover) tax regime for solo self-employed in Italy to study turnover responses to taxation. I find that solo self-employed bunch below the turnover threshold to be eligible for the preferential scheme. Effects are different in different sectors, with professionals and business intermediaries showing the largest responses. Then, I estimate the turnover tax elasticity by focusing on the (last) marginal buncher. To do so, I adapt the models of Kleven and Waseem (2013) and Harju et al. (2019) to derive a modified indifference condition that fits the institutional set-up. The baseline estimate for the turnover tax elasticity is 0.072.

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates whether controlling local offices in competitive autocracies results in a better local electoral performance at the national level, as previous literature has suggested for democracies. Using newly coded electoral data from Venezuela and a regression discontinuity design in close elections, the study examines the causal effect of controlling the municipal executive on the national (and local) electoral performance of the pro-regime party. We find evidence of a negative spillover effect, where the election of a pro-regime mayor leads to a 4 percentage point decrease in their party's vote share in the subsequent national elections and a 24 percentage point reduction in the probability of electing a pro-regime mayor in the next election. To explain those results, we build a model of political selection in competitive autocracies, which suggests that a relevant channel may be a negative selection effect of pro-regime mayoral candidates. We rule out alternative explanations using newly coded data on a major housing project.

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates the multifaceted concept of civic engagement measured along three dimensions: participation in civil society organizations, voting at national elections, citizens’ online participation in the policymaking process. Based on those dimensions, we test empirically on a sample of 27 democracies observed from 2000 to 2019 the argument according to which more participative societies are likely to be associated with higher government spending and redistribution programs. We exploit shocks to environmental concerns that affect countries differently depending on preferences for collectivism (versus individualism), geo-climate features, attitudes towards online (versus in presence) participation, as exogenous drivers of the dimensions of civic engagement we analyze. We find that civil and electronic participation increase aggregate government spending and, looking at its composition, social protection, public order, environmental protection. On the other hand, voter participation decreases the level of government spending.

ABSTRACT. Although honesty is likely the most important trait for a politician, we lack evidence on the selection of crime-prone individuals into the political arena. In this paper, we take advantage of administrative individual data on the Brazilian population to study whether criminally charged individuals are more or less likely to enter politics, we examine their policy-making once elected, and how policy influences their selection into politics. Criminally prosecuted individuals are about twice more likely to enter politics and to be elected than non-criminals, a difference not driven by observable characteristics. Then, by using a regression discontinuity (RD) analysis, we show that in municipalities where incriminated mayors are in power, there is a higher incidence of political patronage, in line with an entry into politics driven by rent-seeking motives. Finally, we show that the entry of criminally charged individuals is only marginally prevented by policies aimed at reducing rent-seeking, i.e. anti-corruption audits.

ABSTRACT. Due to endogeneity and cultural issues, assessing the causal impact of narrativeson beliefs and behaviors remains an empirical open question in socialsciences. To overcome these limitations, we report results of a novel, contentneutrallaboratory experiment where agents (i) participate in a zero-sum gameagainst a non-strategic robot in which the final outcome is determined, withequal probability, either by actual choices or by randomness, and (ii) are exposedto either hopeful or passive narratives, differing in how ambiguous evidenceis presented to convey alternative causal models about how choiceseffectively map into final outcomes. We find that, independently of the narrative,agents systematically formulate beliefs and make choices under theillusion that, through the latter, they could in fact determine final outcomes. Providing non-ambiguous evidence against this illusionary conviction makesagents correctly update their beliefs, while choices require more time to adjustin a consistent way. Exposing agents to the passive narrative when theyerroneously think that the final outcome is ultimately determined by theirchoices mitigates the incoherence between beliefs and choices. On the otherhand, providing non-ambiguous information that contradicts the content ofthe narrative increases the fraction of random and unexplainable choices.

ABSTRACT. Participants to an online study in Luxembourg are presented fake real-estate advertisements and tasked to make an offer to the shown properties. A random subset is also shown sellers' names that are strongly framed to signal their origins. Our randomised procedure allows us to conclude that, keeping everything else constant, a seller with a sub-Saharan African surnames is systematically offered lower prices. Our most conservative estimates suggest that the average racial appraisal penalty stemming from the demand-side of the housing market is equal to 22,000 euros. Last, we show that this appraisal bias hides important differences across respondents: it is null for the youngest and most educated ones, as well as for those without some personal ties to the African diaspora, but can amount up to around 65,000 euros for those above 40 years of age and without post-secondary education.

ABSTRACT. This paper experimentally investigates the potential existence of dynamically inconsistent individuals under uncertainty. The experiment involves participants making two sequential decisions concerning the allocation of a sum of money, with an ambiguous move by Nature occurring between the decisions, and after the second decision. We conducted two between-subject sessions: one incentivised and one non-incentivised. By analyzing the resulting data, we are able to classify participants into four distinct decision-making types: myopic, resolute, sophisticated and expected utility (EU). Our results suggest that a significant proportion of the participants do not exhibit dynamic inconsistency being either EU, Sophisticated or Resolute, while a proportion are Myopic. Furthermore, we find that in the non-incentivised treatment, a larger proportion of participants are classified as myopic, indicating a lack of awareness of the potential for dynamic inconsistency. These findings have significant implications for economic decision-making and policymaking. By identifying the different types of decision-makers and understanding how they make choices, we can develop more effective strategies to promote desirable outcomes.

ABSTRACT. Can personalized mentorship by experienced workers improve young job seekers' labor market trajectories? To answer this question, we designed and randomized "Meet Your Future", a mentorship program which assisted a subset of 1,112 vocational students during their school-to-work transitions in urban Uganda, where youth unemployment is high. The program improved participants' labor market outcomes. Relative to the control, mentored students were 27% more likely to work three months after graduation; after one year, they earned 18% more. Call transcripts from mentorship sessions and survey data reveal that mentorship primarily improved outcomes through information about entry level jobs and labor market dynamics,and not through job referrals, information about specic vacancies, or through building search capital. Consistent with this finnding, mentored students revise downward their overly optimistic beliefs about starting wages and revise upward beliefs about the returns to experience. As a result, they lower their reservation wages and turn down fewer job offers. The results emphasizes the role of distorted beliefs among job seekers in prolonging youth unemployment and proposes a cost eective and scalable policy with an estimated internal rate of return of 300%.

ABSTRACT. The empirical literature on income instability usually focuses on changes in annual income across calendar years. Annual income, however, may conceal significant short-term fluctuations, leading to underestimation of instability. Despite of the increased availability of higher frequency income data, guidelines on how to best measure instability in such context are lacking. After highlighting the issues in measuring instability at high frequency, in this paper we propose the use of one statistic – the average squared coefficient of variation – which has desirable properties thanks to its decomposability: it allows to disentangle infra-annual and inter-annual components, to isolate plausible seasonal patterns, and to net out upward or downward mobility trends. We complement the methodological discussion by a Monte Carlo experiment, which warns about the importance of assessing instability with infra-annual data especially during recessions. Finally, we analyse monthly income data from the U.S. Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), highlighting how the suggested methodology and monthly data help providing a more detailed picture of income instability.

ABSTRACT. The revisions implemented twice a year by the European Commission significantly change not only the forecasts but also the past values of the output gap. Consequently, many possible time series exist. Based on a new approach for estimating a real-time definition of the business cycle, we develop a comparative framework between ex-post and real-time variables using dynamic panel data models with FE, GLS and AB estimators. The real-time version of the output gap solves the important endogeneity issue between the budget balance and the output gap. Considering the period from 1995 to 2021 and the 19 Eurozone countries, our analysis deepens the cyclical nature of fiscal policy, pointing to robust procyclicality. Regardless of the specification, fiscal policy was found to be procyclical, but real-time and ex-post estimates have shown some interesting discrepancies (i.e., on a real-time basis, discretionary budgetary decisions have never been significantly expansionary, and the likely positive effects of automatic stabilisers during economic downturns have been weakened by spending reductions and/or revenue increases). Our findings may help the future reform of the Stability and Growth Pact.

ABSTRACT. In the present paper, we evaluate the impact of being a UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHS) on the public’s perception. To identify the appropriate counterfactual sample, we extract the sample of potential UNESCO sites from the index entries of the Baedeker travel guidebooks of the beginning of the XXth century. This strategy allows the extraction of a dataset of 1026 Italian cultural and natural sites, 40 of which are already inscribed in the WHL. We evaluate the quality of sites through a text analysis approach. Four different measures, based on the number of citations, the length of the paragraph and the sentiment of the text, evaluate Baedeker’s perception. The propensity score matching analysis identifies the sample of heritage sites not already inscribed in the UNESCO WHL but comparable with the listed one, based on the quality indicators. We find that being a UNESCO WHS has a significant impact in terms of the number of citations, but not in terms of the length of the paragraph or the sentiment of the text.

ABSTRACT. The Italian justice system has faced criticism for its handling of unjust detentions, where individuals are detained for a significant period of time but later released due to a lack of evidence or wrongful conviction. From 1992 to 2021, there have been numerous cases of unjust detention and certified judicial errors in Italy, resulting in substantial compensation costs. Drawing on data from the Ministry of Justice for the period 2016-2021, we employ a smoothed instrumental variables quantile regression method to investigate the determinants of convictions for unjust detention. The findings highlight the importance of addressing prison overcrowding, ensuring access to legal representation, enhancing judicial efficiency, and tackling socio-economic disparities to reduce wrongful detentions. To improve efficiency, measures such as prevention, quicker resolution, and accountability are recommended.

ABSTRACT. This paper provides a theoretical examination on how the distribution of wealth in society affects the social costs of crime and law enforcement. We show that a reduction in inequality reduces these costs when enforcement and non-monetary punishment are equitable, i.e., they do not discriminate among offenders based on their wealth.  However, when enforcement or non-monetary punishment is discriminatory, a reduction in inequality may increase the social costs of crime and law enforcement, in particular when it occurs among poorer individuals. Thus, there is a complementarity between equity in criminal justice and distributional equity.

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates the effects of a specific governmental place-based policy to fight depopulation: the Italian Strategy for Inner Areas (SNAI). Taking advantage of the most recent developments in the econometrics of policy evaluation, we apply a staggered difference-in-difference estimator to evaluate the impact of public policy in terms of population structure and the number of plants at municipal level. The analysis is made possible thanks to a detailed panel dataset containing information about the Italian municipalities over the years 2014-2020. The results show that, over the first two years, the policy did not affect the population structure, but it has generated a significant number of extra plants in the treated municipalities. A further key issue is whether the policy has generated spillover effects on neighbours which may either corroborate the encouraging result or invalidate it. To answer this question we combine the baseline model with a spatial empirical strategy, and we find positive spillover effects for extra plants on neighbouring municipalities

ABSTRACT. This paper measured Urban Creativity (UC) through the efficiency analysis of cultural heritage (CH) and creative economy (CE). We combine Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) in a two-stage approach to a third method, Weighted Entropy. We take into consideration UC data from 2014 to 2019 and investigate the Italian cities at the NUTS-3 level that correspond to the 107 Italian provinces. The first results show that CH in Italian cities is overall more efficient than CE, which plays, however, an important role in driving UC efficiency up in cities with inefficient CH. Moreover, some environmental factors influence the efficiency of Urban creativity, especially local political action.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines the causal effect of connecting a region to a high-speed rail (HSR) network on firm-level total factor productivity (TFP). Using a Difference-in-Differences research design and exploiting the quasi-random location of an HSR station near the city of Reggio Emilia in Italy, the study compares firms within a 30 km radius of the HSR station (treatment group) with firms located between 30 and 60 km from the station (control group). The results reveal that the opening of the HSR station improved TFP for treated firms by approximately 4% on average, with larger effects observed for firms closer to the station. The positive impact on TFP is particularly pronounced for small firms and those with lower initial TFP levels. Furthermore, the study finds evidence of negative spillovers on firms located 30-40 km away from the HSR station, indicating potential spatial reorganization of economic activity. The findings contribute to the limited literature on firm-level productivity effects of transportation network connections and highlight the importance of considering heterogeneity in assessing the impact of HSR infrastructure on regional development.

ABSTRACT. This paper analyses the impact of entrepreneurs’ preferences (time impatience and risk attitudes) on firms’ propensity to make general investments and also specific investments in digital technologies. To fulfil this aim, we use the responses to the questions intended to measure risk attitude and patience included in the Rilevazione su Imprese e Lavoro (RIL) survey conducted by INAPP on a representative sample of Italian firms. The regression estimates show that time impatience has at most a weak effect on firms’ ‘general’ investments, while it reduces the propensity to undertake investments in digital technologies. Risk attitude is positively correlated with digital investment, even though the estimates are weaker in magnitude and statistical significance than those found for impatience. These results are robust to simultaneity and endogeneity issues.

ABSTRACT. We study the short- and medium-run employment responses to the withdrawals of two programs that expanded the coverage and generosity of unemployment benefits in the U.S. from March to August 2021. That 18 states withdrew unemployment benefits earlier than other states offers a unique policy setting to investigate transitions out of unemployment by race/ethnicity, implications for the quality of job matches, and the persistence of employment effects. Difference-in-differences estimates using panel data from the U.S. Current Population Survey demonstrate that states’ withdrawals of unemployment benefits increased transitions from unemployment to employment, but with large racial heterogeneity: Black and Asian individuals experienced increases in transitions from unemployment into inactivity as a result of the policy change, while White individuals exiting unemployment generally transitioned into employment. Regarding job quality, the benefit withdrawals increased the take-up of lower-pay routine and manual occupations. One year after the policy change, the positive employment effect of the early benefit withdrawal had disappeared, while the negative effects on job quality outcomes persisted.

ABSTRACT. This paper proposes an analysis of occupational accidents in Italy at the regional level. To this purpose, our panel is composed by 20 regions over the 2010-2019 time span. We apply different econometric estimation techniques (pooled OLS model, panel fixed and random effects models and semiparametric fixed model) using INAIL and ISTAT data. Our models investigate workplace accidents at regional level by accounting for socio-economic, labour market, productive system variables, also controlling for possible underreporting bias. Among our main findings, the analysis show that workers skills (blu collar) strongly affect the regional pattern of workplace accidents. Moreover, our results highlight a non-linear relationship between GDP and occupational accidents for the Italian regional context.

ABSTRACT. Generic entry should allow to reduce expenditure both in the short and the long run, but there is no consensus in the literature on the effects of drug substitution on health outcomes because of several factors. Our paper takes an in innovative look at the choice between generic and branded drug by studying it as a problem of brand loyalty. Our preliminary results show that only a small fraction of individuals switch from brand to generic and viceversa, the initial choice seems to determine future consumption patterns.

ABSTRACT. Mental disorders have become a global public health concern to the extent that the WHO's Global Burden of Disease identifies mental illness as the most burdensome disease category in terms of total disability-adjusted years for adults younger than 45, and depression is one of the most taxing conditions (WHO, 2008; Layard, 2017). Still, mental health disorders remain often unaddressed due to both an underestimation of the problem and widespread inequalities in access to care (e.g., psychologists are mainly private specialists and GPs are often unprepared to provide proper support). An important role in correctly identify and quantify the phenomenon of mental illness may be played by personal and societal stigma which may refrain individuals from openly share their problems and look for help.

In this perspective, gender stereotypes may be a relevant driver since they impose societal expectations on the role individuals have to play in society based on their own gender with several potential consequences. First, deviating in terms of behaviors and/or expectations from the what dictated by gender stereotypes may be cause of deep distress and, consequently, of poor mental health (i.e., Stevenson and Wolfers, 2009, Herbst, 2011). Second, individuals can resort less frequently to professional help to conform to the idea supported by gender stereotypes leading to a lower than needed access to care and/or a delayed access to care (i.e., (Deane and Chamberlain, 1994, Komiya et al., 2000; Mahalik et al., 2003, Vogel and Wester, 2003, Lindinger-Sternart, 2015). Finally, not conforming to the expectations set by gender stereotypes may be cause of stigma as far as mental health is concerned (Link et al. 2001).

Hence, the present study investigates how gender stereotypes may affect the propensity to reveal one's own actual mental status. To this end, we designed an online experiment to directly manipulate the salience of individual stereotypes through the display of one of 3 sets of images: stereotype activating images (i.e., Stereotypes condition), control images (i.e., Neutral condition) and counter-stereotype activating images (i.e., Counter-stereotypes condition). As shown in Figure \ref{fig:stereo_im}, the stereotype activating images portray two fictional characters -- a man and a woman -- engaged in a stereotypical activity in a home context (i.e., bathroom, living room and kitchen) as in the case of an hypothetical bathroom where a woman puts on makeup in the mirror while a man changes a light bulb. Differently, the counter-stereotype activating images depict the same exact situations but reversing the activities between the man and the woman (Figure \ref{fig:counter_im}). As a result, the one changing the light bulb in the bathroom is the woman while the man combs his hair in the mirror. Finally, neutral images just show the exact same hypothetical home rooms as in the other two sets of images but without any person in them (Figure \ref{fig:control_im}).\footnote{We are aware that using a home-related setting for the actions might be per se' evoking gender dynamics. This element should be considered in the final interpretation of the effects of the treatments compare to the neutral version of the images. To ensure that the gender-related images were effective cues for activating gender stereotypes while their reverse version were effective in making salient gender counter-stereotypes, we previously tested the images on 170 individuals aged 20-64 living in Italy (who did not take part in the main experiment) who recruited on MTurk between November 17 and December 11, 2021.}

The three treatment conditions and related images were included in an online survey\footnote{The survey was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA) (Prot. N. 11542 - 13/05/2022) and registered at AEA-RCT registry (AEARCTR-0009422). All participants gave their informed consent at the beginning of the survey.}. Participants were randomly assigned to one of the three treatment conditions and the images were introduced within the framework of an attention check. Specifically, the online questionnaire includes a first part collecting the basic socio-demographic and health information of participants (e.g., sex, age, province of residence, marital status) followed by a second part focusing on working and financial conditions (e.g., employment status, sector of employment) and a part containing questions aimed at measuring the implicit gender stereotypes of participants. Then, participants were presented with a task to check their level of attention: they had to look for 10 seconds at three images each of which was followed by a 3-item multiple choice question. Once the images were over, participants were asked to complete with one single word both the following statements: (i) Carlo is really a good ..; (ii) Carla is really a good … with Carlo being a male name and Carla a female name.\footnote{According to the data of the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) in 1999 the name Carlo accounted for the 0.33\% of the names used for baby boys (0.3\% in 2020) while Carla accounted for the 0.12\% (0.09\% in 2020) of the names used for baby girls. In the national registry of engineers as downloaded at 2022, the name Carlo identifies the 1\% of the males while Carla the 0.04\% of the females.}. Finally, the survey ends with questions on the mental health status of participants.

To assess the mental conditions of participants, we rely on two validated measures: the 4-item Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-4) and the 8-item Patient Health Questionnaire depression scale (PHQ-8). For both indexes, increasing values indicate higher level of perceived stress and depression respectively. The online survey was administered to two separate sample of participants in Italy. First, during June 2022, the survey was administered through email invitations by Demetra opinioni.net srl, a market survey company, to 2,612 participants representative of the working age (up to 65) Italian population by gender and age groups (younger than 35, 35-55, older than 55). Second, between June and August 2022, the same online survey was administered through Qualtrics to the enrollees to two professional orders: engineers and architects. These professions were chosen because they imply overlapping competences but they differ substantially in terms of gender composition. Overall, the final sample includes 10,252 engineers and 2,454 architects.

Overall, we observe an effect only on the general population with women being more prone to reveal their mental health status when exposed to the gender stereotypical images, while the same effect is displayed by men when exposed to the gender counter-stereotypical images.

ABSTRACT. The COVID-19 vaccination campaign can be considered a success of the public sector. Given the shock caused by the pandemic, the visible and successful response of public authorities regarding vaccination might have caused an increase in trust towards them. In this paper we test whether the vaccination process has increased the Marginal Willingness to Pay Taxes, and if this is so, whether the impact is likely to endure. Taking advantage of the different paths of vaccination in Spain (first, more vulnerable groups; among others, those over 65 years old), we perform a difference-in-difference empirical strategy that allows to infer causality running from vaccination to MWTP. While we find an increase in the MWTP at the moment of vaccination, this impact vanishes right after. Hence, good governance related to vaccination just provoked euphoria (i.e., a peak of trust), and a consequent increase in the MWTP, but no more than that.