ABSTRACT. In parliamentary democracies, government formation depends on more than just elections; it often requires bargaining among parties. We analyze parliamentary data from European elections (1945-2020) and Spanish municipal elections (1999-2019) to study the impact of party incumbency on government formation. We examine how an incumbent party’s bargaining ability, distinct from its electoral advantage, influences government formation. Our findings suggest that incumbents benefit from an electoral advantage, aiding them in appointing governments. Conditional on votes, however, incumbent parties are less likely to form the government---suggesting challenges in bargaining and coalition-building associated with their incumbency status. This effect is stronger for longer-term incumbents and when there is no recent history of coalitions with other parties. Indeed, when third parties are kingmakers, other parties compete for their support by offering them vice-mayor positions---and incumbents are less likely to win this game. Several explanations could be consistent with the available evidence. Opposition parties may be more willing to share power the longer they stay away from power, making anti-incumbent coalitions more likely. They could also struggle to support an incumbent they have criticized in the past. Finally, they might be enforcing a social norm against incumbent parties perpetuating themselves in power.

ABSTRACT. This paper shows that the term length for politicians affects public finances. Specifically, I show that the staggered extension of term lengths for U.S. governors from two to four years decrease yearly expenditures and revenues by 6 percent. Further, I show that this effect comes from stronger re-election incentives to a longer and thus more valuable term. The incentive effect is isolated from the potential effect of worsened candidate selection by exploiting that voters in general both approve longer terms and elect the last two-year term governor in the same election. In addition, I find that longer terms cause republican governors to exert effort to reduce the size of government without decreasing the level of public goods, while democratic governors instead increase the level of public goods without increasing government spending and revenues. My findings highlight the importance of constructing an institutional framework that gives politicians strong incentives to perform.

ABSTRACT. In principal-agent relationships, agents' decisions often conflict with principals' interests, particularly when agents have more information. This issue is pervasive in corporate governance, healthcare, and politics. In politics, redistribution can be excessively generous due to agents not bearing the costs. By means of an innovative laboratory experiment, the Political-Agent Game (PAG), we provide evidence that competition among agents reduces conflicts of interest, aligning redistributive behavior with voters' preferences. (Political) competition decreases the extent of redistribution and enhances citizen representation. These findings suggest that institutional designs incorporating political competition can mitigate principal-agent problems, even under information asymmetry.

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates how the interplay between politics and business influences the profiles of political candidates and their policy decisions. Specifically, we analyze the effects of anti-revolving door laws, which impose a mandatory "cooling-off" period before former politicians can take significant positions in the bureaucracy or state-owned enterprises. We develop a political agency model where politicians can access "politically connected outside options" (PCOs), and examine how the reduction in the expected value of these PCOs impacts candidate selection. Our findings suggest that a decline in the value of PCOs disproportionately affects candidates with lower human capital, thereby increasing the proportion of high human capital candidates. Simultaneously, this shift heightens the likelihood that low human capital politicians will pander toward the voters, even when such policies are suboptimal. Using data from Italian municipalities, we empirically test these predictions. Leveraging a population threshold that triggers the implementation of anti-revolving door policies, we employ a difference-in-discontinuity approach. Our results show that the cooling-off period raises the average education levels of candidates and elected mayors. Additionally, we find that the reform reduces the tendency of low human capital mayors to adopt electorally costly policies.

ABSTRACT. I explore the effects of institutional changes in tax collection on VAT remittances at the retail stage, using data on individual firms’ tax files from the universe of German VAT returns. More specifically, I explore if tax evasion increases at the “last mile” due to the implementation of the so-called “reverse charge (RC)” mechanism in Germany. With the implementation of RC, Germany is increasingly removing VAT withholding along the value chain. To identify the effects of RC, I employ an instrumental variable (IV) approach. The IV approach exploits the institutional variation of RC based on the staggered introduction of RC in certain industries. The findings do not indicate that RC leads to greater evasion at the retail stage.

ABSTRACT. This paper analyzes reduced Value-Added Tax (VAT) rates in the European Union countries, considering their role in balancing revenue generation and social equity. This role is contentious. Indeed, while reduced rates might partially counterbalance the regressive nature of consumption taxes, detractors contend they generate unintentional redistribution and enable tax evasion - hence generating costs that might exceed their benefits. This study conducts a quantitative assessment evaluating the effectiveness of reduced VAT rates in redistributing resources as well as the extent to which they could increase the compliance gap. When comparing the benefits from reduced VAT rates against their costs, we conclude that reduced VAT rates are, in general, a cost-ineffective policy. Correcting for the inefficiency-cost we estimate they cause, in terms of compliance gap, would allow to largely compensate for the overall small benefits that they generate, in terms of redistribution to poorest households.

ABSTRACT. Fiscal policies frequently determine discontinuities in the average tax rate; for example, introducing fiscal benefits or flat-rate tax for those who report an income below a threshold produces a large discontinuous jump in tax liability – a notch – at the threshold. These notched tax schemes create strong and salient incentives to bunch below the threshold, either reducing their work or increasing non-compliance behaviour. Empirical evidence consistently reports a density hole above the notch point in the taxpayers' income distribution, but less than theoretically expected (e.g., Kleven and Waseem, 2013); experimental evidence supports the existence of bunching behaviour but not to the full extent what questions the understanding of incentives in notched fiscal systems (Gibson et al., 2019). More importantly, the empirical studies on bunching can hardly distinguish whether the bunching observed in reported income is due to an adjustment in labour supply or to misreporting. We provide evidence of taxpayers' responses to incentives produced by the notch in personal income taxation in a controlled setting; in particular, we investigate how tax evasion possibilities influence bunching. Four between-subject treatments with 90 subjects each are implemented in the laboratory: the earnings of a real-effort task based on sliders (Gill and Prowse, 2012) are taxed with (i) a proportional scheme without evasion possibilities, (ii) a proportional scheme with evasion possibilities (iii) a notched scheme without evasion possibilities, (iii) a proportional scheme with evasion possibilities, (iv) a notched scheme with evasion possibilities. Results show clear evidence of bunching: bunching emerges in notched tax systems both with and without tax evasion. Furthermore, tax evasion possibilities do not crowd out labour supply adjustment: taxpayers react to notches by adjusting both effort and reported income.

ABSTRACT. Decentralisation policies are widely used to pursue efficient management of public funds and improved provision of public goods. However, there is limited knowledge regarding the specific conditions that ensure these policies yield positive outcomes. While the existing literature documents the general benefits of decentralisation, there is considerably less understanding of how pre-existing disparities in municipal bureaucratic capacity affect the effectiveness of these policies. We address this gap by examining the constitutional decentralization reform of 2001 in Italy (L.Cost. 3/2001), which significantly enhanced the role of local governments in managing public resources and services. Leveraging a spatial difference-in-discontinuities design and panel data from 1998-2007, our analysis reveals that decentralisation led to an increase in municipal investment spending without resorting to tax rate increases. However, we find that the impact is contingent on local bureaucratic capacity. Only municipalities with high capacity favour the allocation of resources to nursery schools, administrative services, and education and administrative staff.

ABSTRACT. There is increasing evidence on the geographical mobility of high-earners in response to tax differentials; however, it is unclear to what extent tax-induced mobility reflects a true movement of human capital or merely a relocation of tax bases for fiscal purposes. In this paper I study internal migration between Italian municipalities in response to changes in local tax differentials. Using administrative data on bilateral transfers of residence between municipalities, and exploiting variation in local tax rates between location pairs over time, I document three findings. First, changes in local income tax differentials induce transfers of residence towards low-income-tax municipalities, in line with the literature. Second, individuals move towards locations with higher property tax rates, after a reform exempted owner-occupied residences from property taxation, creating incentives to relocate to take advantage of a larger tax exemption. Last, preliminary results using a novel administrative data source point towards no effect of changes in local tax differentials on work- and study-related transfers between municipalities. These findings suggest that local taxation affects the distribution of tax revenue across jurisdictions, but with limited impact on the location of human capital.

ABSTRACT. Can fiscal autonomy affect per-capita income levels? The existing literature shows mixed results on the impact of fiscal autonomy on GDP growth, it often uses cross-country datasets comparing nations with different socio-economic contexts. Even when it digs into the subnational entities of a nation either financial indexes or institutional dummies are used as proxies for fiscal autonomy: both can imply endogeneity due either to measurement errors or reverse causality. We empirically investigate the impact of fiscal autonomy on per-capita income stimulated by the proper use of local financial resources. We do this by exploiting an Italian natural experiment comparing the impact on per-capita income of the use of own resources in municipalities belonging to the autonomous provinces of Trento and Bolzano, which manage almost all their taxes autonomously, to those belonging to the neighbouring regions of Veneto and Lombardy, which manage only a small fraction of taxes paid by their citizens. We use a spatial fuzzy regression discontinuity design to compare similar municipalities on the border between the provinces of Trento and Bolzano and Lombardy and Veneto. We find that the higher the level of local financial fiscal autonomy, proxied by the ratio of own tax revenue to total revenue, the higher the level of per-capita income. The proxy is instrumented with a dummy indicating municipalities with a real institutional fiscal autonomy: those belonging to the provinces of Trento and Bolzano. This allows us to interpret the proxy as an exogenous variation indicating institutional fiscal autonomy. We find that a 10 percentage points increase in financial fiscal autonomy increases per-capita income by 3%. Hence, our results suggest that local governments that are more accountable and closer to citizens, manage their revenues in a more efficient way than in the case when they receive transfers from the centre.

ABSTRACT. We test the impact of inter-municipal cooperation on percapita expenditure and physical output relative to services managed in cooperation and services managed by its own. The first novelty of our work is the detail of the dataset at local service level. This dimension is extremely important to properly evaluate the impact of inter-municipal cooperation, which usually covers only some specific services. The second novelty is the use of specific of output indexes for the six most relevant provided services. We find that for services managed through an inter-municipal cooperation per capita expenditure decreases and in the same municipality it slightly increases for those services managed by its own, leaving in both cases output unchanged. This generates in the former case an increase in efficiency and in latter case a decrease in efficiency. However, the magnitude of the first effect is stronger than that of the second one. Interestingly, when we concentrate the analysis on small municipalities with less than 3,000 inhabitants, inter-municipal cooperation leads also to an increase in output for those services jointly managed. This is particularly important in Italy where 56% of municipalities has less than 3,000 inhabitants.

ABSTRACT. The European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) has become the cornerstone of the European Union’s strategy to decarbonize the economy and mitigate climate change. Following these objectives, the aim of this paper is to assess the impact of the price of carbon, which is linked to the European market of allowances, on carbon dioxide emissions. To do so, we propose an econometric model that extends the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) model in several directions. First, the price of carbon, which is the policy variable, is introduced in the model in a nonparametric fashion; Second, we propose to use an interactive fixed effects approach to control for latent heterogeneities in both dimensions of panel data; Third, to allow for spatial dependence, we introduced spatially correlated errors. The extended EKC model poses various challenges for estimation. To cope with them, using a profile likelihood approach, we propose a Feasible Generalized Least Squares estimator of the parameters of interest. Furthermore, the policy effects curve is also efficiently estimated. The asymptotic properties of the estimators are shown and, based on these outcomes, we empirically evaluate the policy effects. Our approach yields significantly different and more meaningful results compared to those obtained using standard estimation techniques.

ABSTRACT. This work provides an empirical investigation on the relationship between air pollution (PM2.5, NO2, and O3) and income in Italy over time, employing a spatial concentration dataset aggregated at municipality level and a local measure of taxable income. Our findings are consistent with an inverse U-shaped environmental Kuznets curve only for fine particulate matter (PM2.5): air pollution releases increase with income up to a turning point where the relation reverts. However, when splitting the sample into two macro-territorial areas (i.e., Center-North and South), the estimates obtained are influenced by the geographical dimension: Southern regions exhibit an environmental Kuznets curve for NO2, PM2.5, and O3, while in the Northern regions an inverted U-shaped relationship is evident only for NO2. The Northern regions display a negative linear relationship between PM2.5 and income, which instead shows a U-shaped relationship with O3. This latter result could be explained by a combination of the intrinsic characteristics of ozone and by the industrial specificity of the Po Valley area which is one of the most important industrial and agricultural areas in Italy.

ABSTRACT. This paper evaluates the additional spending needed to meet core targets of selected Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) while accounting for the associated cost to address climate risks. The SDGs under study are those related to human and physical capital development. An additional 3.8 percent of global GDP, or US$3.4 trillion, of public and private spending will be required by 2030 to achieve a strong performance in the selected SDGs while addressing associated climate risks. This includes an increase of 0.4 percent of global GDP (US$358 billion) compared to estimates that do not account for mitigation and adaptation needs within these sectors. LIDCs and SSA experience the highest climate-related cost augmentation relative to GDP, while EMEs (driven by large Asian emerging economies) bear the largest cost in absolute terms.

ABSTRACT. A pivotal factor in the strategies behind the energy transition is improving the energy efficiency of the residential sector, which contributes significantly to the countries’ energy consumption. To this end, many countries, including Italy, have promoted tax policies to stimulate households to engage in energy-saving home renovations. This study aims to make a distinctive contribution to the ongoing debate surrounding the efficacy of fiscal incentives in enhancing efficiency and boosting the energy transition. This debate has gained renewed attention after the pandemic and global crises, delving into the influence of energy tax credits. The analysis uses a PVAR model in Italian regions to comprehensively investigate the concurrent impact of fiscal incentives, energy consumption, and energy transition while accounting for various control variables. It seeks to elucidate the role of fiscal incentives in steering the trajectory toward green energy transition. This investigation is particularly relevant in a historical period characterized by heightened awareness and commitment to energy transition and decarbonization. Results confirm the effectiveness of the incentives to improve energy efficiency. They are attractive for households determined to perform more energy-saving renovations and useful for the government focused to foster a low-carbon-oriented and grid-friendly adoption in the energy transition context.

ABSTRACT. Annuity conversion factors (also known as transformation coefficients) have gained increasing relevance in most of existing pension systems due to reforms inspired by the ideal of actuarial fairness. However, as far as life expectancy may sensibly differ across groups of individuals by socioeconomic status (e.g., income), unintended perverse redistribution may arise in the presence of uniform (non-diversified) annuity factors. In this paper, by using a sub-sample of the Italian population of private sector employees (WHIP-Salute), we provide evidence on the magnitude of such perverse redistribution. By using a counterfactual approach, we compare inequality in the factual distribution of expected lifetime pension income obtained under the hypothesis of uniform annuitization, with inequality one would observe in the presence of non-uniform annuity factors diversified by socioeconomic status. For cohorts from 1960 to 1969 retiring with an old-age or seniority pension from 2020 to 2036, we do find that redistribution is perverse and increasing over time due to both (i) enhancing longevity gaps by income and (ii) progressive transition from DB to NDC pension scheme.

ABSTRACT. We study the effect of (informal) care provision patterns on late-life access to economic resources among women’s using SHARE data. We find that the earnings drop among women who retired to take care of a relative are almost three times the drop of women who retired for other reasons. This result sheds light on part of the unexplained lifetime earnings and the pension gender gap.

ABSTRACT. The last few years have seen an acceleration in the ageing process of the worldwide population, caused by both the reduction in fertility rates and the increase in life expectancy, despite the interlude of the Covid-19 period. This process is producing changes also in the characteristics of poverty: the poor are ageing like the rest of the population. This phenomenon is documented here for all EU countries. It has received limited attention to date because the risk of poverty is often very high for young people, but the analysis of the poverty profile by age group shows the importance of distinguishing between the incidence of poverty within age groups and the composition of overall poverty by group. The paper proposes a simple decomposition of the changes in the poverty index and of the composition of the poor into a within-groups poverty rate effect and a group size effect. The evidence obtained allows for a new interpretation of the distributional effects of the citizenship income in force in Italy from 2019 to 2023.

ABSTRACT. Decades of research have assumed the stability of risk preferences across domains and ages. However, recent evidence has shown that it might not be the case since variations in the level of risks taken are, in fact, observable. Economics and Psychology literature investigated such issue, providing mixed evidence regarding changes across ages. This paper provides the first exhaustive meta-analytical review of the results of the economic and psychology literature regarding the association between aging and financial risk attitudes. We find differences in the effect mainly due to the methods used for measuring risk preferences. In particular, we find that the positive association between risk aversion and age is verified for survey data and lotteries, while psychological tasks might underline a different process. Metaregression analysis allows us to disentangle the effect of the cognitive abilities and the health status for verifying the link between age and risk.

ABSTRACT. Does autonomy in choosing university programs impact on freshmen’s academic performance? We exploit a unique dataset derived from a cohort of freshmen enrolled at the University of Messina in Italy. Our results show that students with higher levels of autonomy achieve on average higher academic grades, even after accounting for a comprehensive range of socio-demographic and personality factors. Our findings have significant policy implications for improving the higher education system and its connection to the modern labor market. Addressing student performance and reducing drop-out rates requires targeted programs that begin during the school years. These programs may enhance individual autonomy and self-confidence. By aligning prospective students’ attitudes with their chosen courses, we can improve both the quality and quantity of graduates. Furthermore, students who possess autonomy and self-confidence are likely to excel in the labor market, as their chosen educational path enables them to fully utilize their potential, ultimately enhancing their job productivity.

ABSTRACT. Understanding the role of information and future expectations among disadvantaged students is crucial in explaining their investment decisions in higher education. We conduct a field experiment with 6,386 University students in Italy who benefit from need-based financial aid assistance, to study the effects of different types of information provision on students’ expectations and aspirations, and on academic performance. The information treatment consists of two types of messages: one message gives information about the labour market returns of completing college – especially without delays –, and the other informs students on the importance of keeping financial aid to reach (timely) completion. The results show that the latter message has a positive effect on the aspiration of getting a job with good career prospects, and it reduces the intention of searching for part-time positions. Both messages increases students’ expectations of finding a job satisfying their personal ambitions within one year from graduation, and of being in a highly skilled profession by the age of forty. Interestingly, these results are driven by the financial aid recipients with less educated parents, further suggesting that students with non-college-educated parents may lack important information. Preliminary results show positive effect of the information treatments on the academic performance of the students after the treatment.

ABSTRACT. This study investigates the potential influence of university professors' geographic origins on biases in student grading. Utilizing a comprehensive dataset from an Italian university spanning from 2016 to 2023, we examine whether a sense of local identity among professors affects their evaluation decisions, particularly towards students whose surnames are commonly associated with the local area. The findings reveal a statistically significant positive bias in favor of students with common local surnames, particularly pronounced among professors who themselves originate from the same geographic region. This bias decreases with increasing geographic distance, highlighting how regional identity can subtly influence academic evaluations.

ABSTRACT. This study examines gender bias in tertiary student evaluations of teachers (SETs). We find that although the gender of the teacher does not affect actual student performance, students perceive male professors as better than their female colleagues. We analyze the potential mediators of this cognitive bias and find that cognitive bias decreases with students’ knowledge of tertiary education and exposure to female professors, while prejudice against women is reinforced with greater exposure to male lecturers. The emergence of gender bias in SETs suggests that these evaluations cannot be used to compare male and female teachers at the undergraduate level. However, these tools can be potentially reliable for graduate students if they have been exposed to gender-balanced faculty.

ABSTRACT. When judging the distributional impact of a sin tax, what matters is not just how much low income people would pay but how much the tax would benefit or harm them overall. In this paper, we assess the consumer welfare impact of a fat tax net of its expected benefits computed as savings from weight loss. We use Italian data to estimate a censored Exact Affine Stone Index (EASI) incomplete demand system for food groups and simulate changes in purchases, calorie intake, consumers’ welfare and the monetary value of the tax's short run health benefits. Our results suggest costs from taxation are larger than benefits at all income levels. As a fraction of income, the net impact would be slightly regressively distributed.

ABSTRACT.  This paper analyzes the association between income and health, considering various influencing factors. To explore this relationship, we develop a basic model of labor economics that connects income, leisure, and health. The model reveals that individuals substitute work with leisure as wages increase beyond a certain threshold. Additionally, we identify a range of wage rates where disease prevention is more cost-effective than treatment. A panel threshold regression model is applied to test the threshold effect of the wage rate on health status, among 20 OECD countries, from 2003 to 2022. The empirical results strongly show that a threshold effect exists; therefore, the regression is divided into two regimes.

ABSTRACT. This paper aims to assess the impact of a cash transfer programme implemented in Italy since 2014, known as the '80 euro bonus', on health outcomes as gauged by mortality rates. Using municipality-level data over the period 2010-2019 and a difference-in-differences approach, we find a significant reduction in mortality rates associated with the size of cash transfers and the number of recipients in the municipality. This effect remains robust across several checks. Furthermore, at the provincial level, we observe sustained decreases in mortality rates, especially for cancer and cardiovascular diseases, in the areas with a higher concentration of cash transfer recipients. These results support the positive impact of increased financial resources on health outcomes and highlight the role of cash transfers as effective tools for public health policies.

ABSTRACT. This paper studies the object allocation problem, which involves assigning objects to agents while taking into account both object capacities and agents’ preferences. I focus on two classes of allocations: the Pareto efficient and Individual rational allocations and the Pareto efficient and Weak-core stable allocations. The goal is to look at two optimality criteria within these classes: one that maximizes the number of individuals improving upon their initial endowment (MAXDIST), and the one that minimizes the number of individuals who need to change from their initial allocation to the final one (MINDIST).

I present an efficient algorithm for addressing the MAXDIST problem for the first class of allocations (Pareto efficient and Individual rational). Next, I study a special case of this problem where priority is given to the most disadvantaged individuals. I establish NP-completeness results for the other problems. I also look at how the results change when restricting individual preferences to be dichotomous. Finally, I present an integer programming formulation to solve small to moderately sized instances of the NP-hard problems.

ABSTRACT. Scholars increasingly investigate wealth inequality at the country level. In parallel, regional studies show the relevance of disaggregating national findings. This paper aims to contribute to both fields by building a reliable estimate of within-region household wealth concentrations in Italy. The analysis uses data from the Bank of Italy Survey on Household Income and Wealth from 1998 to 2020 adjusted by National and Regional Accounts. Furthermore, a decomposition analysis is performed to individualize the relevance of wealth components on cross-regional differences. The results show that financial asset distribution has grown to be the main driver of the wealth inequality variation between regions in recent years.

ABSTRACT. Caesarean sections are on the rise worldwide, and while their impact on maternal outcomes has been well-studied, it is still not clear what long-term consequences caesarean sections have on children. I investigate the effect of an emergency (i.e. not planned) caesarean delivery on the child’s outcomes 9 months after birth and in the longer run, up to 11 years of age. I exploit data on 5,004 first-time mothers and their children from the Millennium Cohort Study, a longitudinal survey of the 2000/2001 birth cohort in the United Kingdom. To address endogeneity I employ an instrumental variable approach that leverages the exogenous variation in the position of the baby in utero – feet-first (breech) vs head-first – at the time of birth, together with hospital and month of birth fixed effects. I find no evidence of a negative impact of C-sections on child health, and a possible heterogeneous effect on cognitive outcomes.

ABSTRACT. In recent years, the use and release of performance indicators on hospital care have become more and more common. The general assumption is that the information will ultimately improve healthcare provision by affecting the behaviors of various stakeholders. Similarly, competition among providers and patient choice are considered by many as means to the end of improving clinical outcomes. We analyze data from the National (Clinical) Outcome Programme (PNE) in Italy from 2008 to 2020 together with novel measures of hospital competition to assess the interplay between collecting and releasing outcome information and hospital competition. Early findings show that the public release of information positively affects clinical outcomes only in more competitive environments.

ABSTRACT. Stroke Units represent the most advanced and effective model for treating acute cerebrovascular disorders, significantly reducing stroke-related mortality and disability. However, equal access to such facilities and effective treatments is not granted to all stroke patients. In this paper, we estimate the effect of access inequality to stroke units, proxied by the distance between a non-stroke unit hospital and the nearest stroke unit, on intra-hospital mortality and emergency transfers. We show that hospitals in the same municipality of a stroke unit have lower intra-hospital mortality and higher emergency transfers than non-stroke unit hospitals located farther away. We show that results are significant in the North of Italy, where we find a higher share of stroke units that comply with the requirements imposed by the law.

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates the factors influencing switches from branded to generic drugs upon patent expiration. We examine large sales lipid-lowering drugs in the Italian NHS focusing on the generic entry of atorvastatin in March 2012. Utilizing individual-level data that allows us to construct consumption trajectories of patient purchases, we distinguish between short- and medium-term effects. Our analysis reveals the significant relevance of patient characteristics, with indicators of more severe health conditions contributing to a delay in generic adoption. While the influence of GP and practice characteristics on immediate switches is minimal, these factors become more pronounced in the medium term. Additionally, we identify a noteworthy role of financial incentives in promoting the switch to generics.

ABSTRACT. Objectives Globalisation and economic integration have increased patients’ mobility, both across countries and within the same nation. The welfare effect of these reforms is not clear. As per patients mobility, Brekke et al. (2014) show that free patients’ choice may be beneficial for users in both high and low skill regions. Patients from high skill regions receive benefits from high skill hospitals, while with free mobility low skill regional patients receive high quality care elsewhere. In the long run, voluntary mobility should disappear: competition should provide a strong incentive to stimulate quality improvements in the less efficient jurisdictions. Nevertheless, patients' mobility may have countervailing effects on welfare when regions with different levels of income compete (Brekke et al., 2016). In some countries (as in Italy, for example) the quality gap has in fact increased and soft budget constraint policies have arisen (Balia et al., 2018; Berta et al., 2021; Levaggi & Menoncin, 2012): In this paper we want to investigate the role of patients’ mobility in the choice of quality levels by decentralised providers in an environment where patients’ mobility is free and the institutional setting as per the organisation of health care may be different. We study the effects of upper Government provision to lower tiers of some form of equalisation grant or mechanisms to regulate patients’ mobility on the quality gap.

Methods We use the framework proposed by Brekke et al. (2014), (2016) and Bisceglia et al. (2018) to study the effects on efficiency and quality of the introduction of an equalisation grant. We model the most two common forms of equalisation grants, i.e. a resource-based and expenditure based ones. We model a market for health care where patients are uniformly distributed on a circle of length equal to one; the size is also normalised to one. The market is split in two different regions, Region 1 and Region 2, corresponding to the two different half circles. The market is served by four health care providers (hospitals) which are located equidistantly on the circle (two for each region). Each patient demands one unit of health care (one treatment). We assume that health care provision is funded through general income taxation and an equalisation grant and that care is free at the point of use. In Region 1 hospital care is supplied by two private, profit maximising providers, while in the other region facilities are owned by the local authority, that maximises a function of both hospital and consumer surplus. We assume that the welfare function in each Region is defined by the sum of income, minus the (money equivalent) disutility of the cost-reducing effort and the (net) utility of health care provision.

Results We show that the form of the equalisation grant matters, especially when the institutional settings are different in the two Regions. However, a trade-off may emerge between the quality gap and the average level of quality.

Discussion Quality gaps in health care are one of the most important drivers for patients mobility, both at national and super-national level. This study may contribute to understand better this problem.

ABSTRACT. This study examines how the incumbent and opposition parties in Uganda framed the COVID-19 pandemic during the 2021 election through their political communication strategies. By analyzing 21,953 tweets from their official Twitter accounts, we employed latent topic modeling, context-embedded regression and sentiment analysis to assess the prevalence of COVID-19 discourse, semantic framing, and emotional tone. The results indicate that both parties concentrated on a limited range of topics but differed significantly in their emotional tone and framing. The opposition adopted a more critical stance, emphasizing crisis and urgency, while the incumbent focused on efforts and unity. Notably, post-election communication strategies converged, reflecting a shift towards unified discourse likely prompted by the ongoing public health crisis.

ABSTRACT. This paper studies political polarization on a multidimensional set and its consequences on the democratic process. To do so, I construct a measure of political polarization based on the 1999-2016 congressional speeches of the United States Representatives. Relying on the exogenous feature of politically divisive events, mass shootings (MSE), I implement a dynamic difference-in-differences design exploiting variation across places and time. First, I document that an MSE significantly increases the polarization on the gun rights topic. Second, I explore how the distance between Democrats and Republicans increases over a range of different topics, revealing how contagious polarization may be. I investigate and analyze different mechanisms which may explain these findings. I focus on describing which politicians talk following a salient event and discussing a possible theoretical framework motivating the results. Finally, I explore how the increase in polarization impacts the democratic process. In the days following an MSE, the probability of passing a new law in the House of Representative decreases. These effects are long lasting: bills voted after such divisive events are also less likely to pass in the future.

ABSTRACT. Even though we live in the golden age of the Internet and social networks, the "idiot box" remains the primary and undisputed source of political information. Meanwhile, the production and consumption of videos, exemplified by platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels, are becoming ubiquitous. However, social scientists rarely use television and videos as primary data sources in quantitative research due to the costs and technical challenges associated with the data collection process. Recent advancements and proliferation of machine learning tools for computer vision and audio analysis have finally paved the way to extract meaningful data from large video archives at a relatively low cost. We demonstrate how to apply these tools through a case study involving a web-scraped collection of 2000 episodes of two prominent Italian Political Talk Shows (PTS). We show how it is possible to extract information regarding who is speaking, when they are speaking, what they are speaking about, and how they are speaking (tone of voice and facial expression). We provide a descriptive analysis of the trends observed in terms of political representation, topics discussed, and emotional behaviors. Additionally, we matched the extracted data to minute-by-minute TV viewership data from Auditel™ to describe how different settings are related to changes in viewership.

ABSTRACT. The local public transportation (LPT) system is a decisive factor for the growth and competitiveness of territories. The efficiency of service providers and the selected procurement system are posited as key factors influencing the operational dynamics of the LPT system. This study combines the analysis of the determinants of service contracts with a comprehensive investigation of the impact of company ownership and the dynamics of LPT service procurement in major Italian cities. Using a GAMLSS (Generalized Additive Models for Location, Shape, and Scale) approach, the study identifies the key factors that influence the outcomes of these contracts. The results of our research shed light on the intricate interplay of cost factors, ownership models and geographical disparities. These findings should provide valuable insights for policy makers and public transportation professionals.

ABSTRACT. To discipline sub-national governments’ financial behaviour, central governments typically impose sanctions (such as higher taxes or a freeze on hiring) on jurisdictions that run in financial difficulties and ask for help to the national budget. However, sanctions on local politicians are less used and usually limited to explicit episodes of fraud. We study the effect of a 2012 Italian reform that instead imposed potentially harsh sanctions on politicians (mayors, executive officers, and councillors) in municipalities declaring bankruptcy, ranging from sizeable pecuniary fines to a ten-year ban on candidacy at any political level. We find mixed results. Consistently with the intended policy consequences, we document that local politicians were generally less likely to declare bankruptcy after the reform for moderate levels of financial difficulties. However, in a RDD design comparing newly elected high skilled (graduate) with no skilled (no graduate) mayors, we find that after the reform the former were more likely to declare bankruptcy than the latter during their first years of term, even though graduate mayors are generally proved to be able to run local government budget better. We conjecture that this was the result of a strategic choice by skilled mayors to blame the previous politicians for the financial troubles of the municipality and find supporting evidence in the data as the Court of Audit, in the case of an early bankruptcy, typically punishes the predecessors of the local administrators who declare bankrupt. Moreover, we show that this strategic behaviour by graduate mayors only occurred in an intermediate case of financial difficulties where a bankruptcy decision was not strictly necessary. Finally, we also find that in this intermediate case the effect of the bankruptcy, which is however costly for citizens in terms of mandated higher taxes and less services, did not lead in the subsequent years to an improvement in the financial condition of the bankrupted municipality with respect to other municipalities in similar conditions that did not declare bankruptcy.

ABSTRACT. Il processo di riforma del federalismo fiscale avviato con la legge 42/2009 ha visto, nella fase iniziale, il rafforzamento della dimensione dell’autonomia finanziaria degli enti locali grazie all’aumento del peso delle entrate derivanti dai tributi propri. Gli ampi spazi di autonomia riconosciuti alla gestione della finanza locale anche dalla Costituzione sono tuttavia andati riducendosi nel corso del tempo con una quota sempre crescente di trasferimenti da parte dello Stato centrale. Per i comuni è in diminuzione non soltanto il peso delle entrate tributarie sul totale delle entrate, ma anche gli spazi di manovrabilità sulle entrate tributarie proprie sia a causa della detassazione delle basi imponibili comunali disposta a livello centrale sia a causa dei limitati spazi residui per l’esercizio dello sforzo fiscale. Diversi e anche recenti interventi normativi decisi a livello centrale hanno quindi contribuito a comprimere progressivamente gli spazi a disposizione dei comuni di gestione delle entrate dai tributi propri. In tale contesto, la capacità dei comuni di provvedere efficacemente alla riscossione dei tributi assume quindi una importanza cruciale ad assicurare il necessario finanziamento dei servizi offerti a livello locale. La riscossione dei tributi da parte dei comuni è però un tema ancora poco approfondito dalla letteratura economica. L’obiettivo di questa analisi è fornire delle prime evidenze sui fattori che determinano la performance dei comuni nella riscossione dei tributi. Utilizzando la banca dati dei rendiconti di bilancio degli enti territoriali, viene analizzato l’andamento degli accantonamenti al Fondo crediti di dubbia esigibilità e derivate alcune prime conclusioni sulla relativa capacità dei comuni di riscuotere i propri tributi, con particolare riferimento alla Tari. La nostra analisi contribuisce al dibattito sull’efficienza del servizio di riscossione da parte degli enti locali, anche alla luce delle recenti proposte di riforma contenute nella legge delega di riforma fiscale.

ABSTRACT. In response to recent European directives, several governments aimed to reduce managing public expenditure costs through centralized public procurement. Previous studies examined centralization effects at regional, national, and European levels, leaving a research gap on the local level's impact. This study fills this gap by investigating PP centralization through municipal mergers. Understanding the nexus between municipal consolidation and the efficacy of public procurement is integral in ascertaining that such amalgamations bolster the commonweal. We estimate a fixed-effect regression model using a wide sample of public works contracts published by municipalities and municipal mergers in Italy from 2012 to 2021 to determine if contracts awarded by merged municipalities perform better in terms of winning rebates, delivery delays, and execution cost overruns. Results show that tenders awarded by larger mergers exhibit higher rebates and shorter delays, but no significant difference in final execution extra costs. Importantly, we observe a direct relationship between voters' resistance to the merger proposal and the contract award phase's performance, suggesting that local administrators may lack accountability in some cases.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this paper is to analyse the distinct roles of quantity and quality of public education in an overlapping generations model both from an individual and a social point of view. First, we examine which is the optimal mix of quantity and quality of education chosen by a parent for her child when the parent is both altruistic and self-interested given that education improve not only the child's ability but also the type of care that she will be able to provide to her old parent. Then, we discuss the optimal mix of quantity and quality of education from a social perspective taking into account the interaction between the financing of public education and social security benefits.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, we study the development of economic rationality in primary school (age 6-10) children within the domains of choice between toys with and without risk. Our interest revolves not only around the development of economic rationality but about the impact of the socio-economic environment. For this reason, we run our study in two different districts of the metropolitan area of Naples (Italy), a city with stark economic inequalities, and we focus on two schools with very different socio-economic environments, a difference confirmed by collected survey statistics on the parents’ education. We show that economic rationality develops with age in both socio-economic environments both in choice with and without risk. The gradient of development by age is significant statistically and in magnitude with our structural estimates of the consideration parameter that almost double in both environments between the 1st and 5th grade.

ABSTRACT. This study investigates the impact of intra-curricula internships on students' intentions, aspirations and labor market performance of Italian graduates in the short run (one year after graduation). Using two official surveys, the Graduates’ Profile Survey and the Graduates' Employment Status Survey conducted by AlmaLaurea, we estimate linear least squares and probit models. Overall, the findings underscore the importance of internships in facilitating the choice to enter the labor market with further differences based on the cycle of study. For second-cycle degrees, internships significantly increase post-graduation employment prospects while, for first-cycle degrees, internships do not directly impact employment rates but encourage job seeking or further education and training, reducing inactivity. Additionally, internships enhance skill and educational matching with job requirements, particularly for bachelor’s graduates.

ABSTRACT. This paper proposes a set of indicators to measure the quality and availability of school infrastructure at the local level, based on information from the Italian school building register (Sistema Nazionale dell’Anagrafe dell’edilizia scolastica, SNAES). The indicators are calculated for each municipality and level of education (from pre-school to upper secondary) and cover several aspects (morphology, functionality, location); an innovative analysis is performed to obtain a measure of potential demand for school services, breaking down the local population by age and average travel time by car, to identify local weaknesses in the availability of school infrastructure. The indicators are also matched with a number of learning progress measures to assess the preliminary and purely descriptive impact of the quality and availability of school buildings on learning processes.

ABSTRACT. This paper aims to assess the possible impact of the SEZs on the behaviour and performance of Italian companies, focusing of the favourable tax regime, implemented in 2020 through a 50% reduction in corporate income tax and the introduction of tax credit on investments in capital goods. The analysis focuses on the dynamics of the increase in fixed assets, used as the dependent variable in order to measure the investment propensity and dynamics of SEZs firms. To measure the effect of the SEZ policy on the italian regions, balance sheet data for the period 2016 -2022 have been analyzed throughout the implementation of a Difference in Differences model. The preliminary findings show that, ceteris paribus, the firms that benefitted from SEZ incentives and allowances have reached higher levels of investment.

ABSTRACT. A large body of literature has analyzed the relationship between determinants of institutional quality at local level and the efficiency of firms with a particular focus on the role of corruption. However, due to reverse causality, the endogeneity problem makes it difficult to identify the real effect of institutional factors at local level on firms’ efficiency. This paper adopts a novel stochastic frontier methodology to examine the relationship between the quality of local institutions and production efficiency and to address endogeneity issues. Specifically, we use a panel stochastic frontier analysis that endogenizes production efficiency and allows us to robustly assess the effect of corruption at local level on firms’ technical efficiency. For this purpose, the paper employs a large panel of Italian firms operating in the building sector from 2013 to 2019. The results indicate that the determinants of the quality of local institutions affect firms’ performance, with a preeminent role played by the rule of law and the control of corruption. Moreover, when controlling for endogeneity, the magnitude of the effects of institutional quality factors at local level increase significantly. Our findings are robust to alternative IV strategies, alternative specifications of the production function, and inclusion of other factors that may affect firms’ efficiency.

ABSTRACT. Job retention and short-time work (STW) schemes typically replace only part of the wage loss suffered by workers during their furlough period. One argument against a high replacement rate is that it may discourage workers from accepting other job offers, thereby hindering reallocation to other firms and sectors. We provide new causal evidence on the impact of a higher replacement rate on job separations and reallocation while on STW, exploiting a discontinuity in the benefit schedule of the Italian STW scheme, the Cassa integrazione guadagni. Our results suggest that a higher replacement rate has a small but non-negligible negative effect on the probability that the worker joins a new firm in the 24 months following the start of an STW episode. The role of the replacement rate is less pronounced when there are fewer outside options for workers.

ABSTRACT. We analyse the impact of the end of the hiring incentives introduced in Italy through the Budget Law for 2015 on job and employment security. Despite the large use of incentives across OECD countries, the literature on this is surprisingly scant. The subsidies aimed to foster hirings under open-ended contracts through very generous social security rebates. The application of a non-linear difference-in-differences specification to high-frequency population-wide employer-employee administrative data source from a large Italian region within a duration setting, suggests that separations spike at the subsidy’s expiration, implying that direct employment effects were at best temporary. Nonetheless, incentives may have benefitted workers beyond their capacity to stay in the subsidized job (what is labelled job security), i.e. through human capital and experience effects, incentives may have raised the workers’ probability to remain employed across different jobs. Indeed, by applying our model to employment rather than job spells, we find that the probability to move to non-employment when the subsidies expire does not significantly change, suggesting that benefitted workers do not enjoy better longer-term employment perspectives thanks to the incentive programme. Heterogeneity analysis shows individuals with tertiary education suffer less from the reduced job security, while no distributive effect emerges in terms of employment security.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between public concern about climate change and the expenditure of Italian municipalities on adaptation policies. Using data from the Aspects of Daily Lives of Italians survey and publicly available annual budgets, we construct a dataset to analyze the impact of citizens' concern about climate change on local government spending. Using a fixed effects regression model, we observe that higher levels of concern about climate change are associated with increased expenditure on adaptation policies by municipalities. Furthermore, we explore various factors that may influence this relationship, including electoral cycles, demographic characteristics, and economic conditions within the municipalities. Our study contributes to the understanding of how public sentiment about climate change can influence local government policy decisions and provides insights for policymakers aiming to address climate change at the local level.

ABSTRACT. The European Union's commitment to a hydrogen economy is highlighted by initiatives like the EU hydrogen strategy and the REPowerEU plan, which aim to decarbonize the economy, reduce dependency on fossil fuels, and foster economic benefits. The aim of the present work is to investigate the social acceptance to hydrogen energy in Italy with the use of an efficient choice experiment design. Despite the technological and infrastructural advancements, consumer acceptance remains a critical barrier. The study reveals that while hydrogen can significantly reduce carbon emissions and provide a sustainable energy alternative, public misconceptions and lack of information present substantial challenges. The paper uses a stated preference approach to assess the economic value and trade-offs associated with a hypothetical hydrogen economy market. Main findings show the existence of a consumer propensity for the adoption of hydrogen energy technologies provided that the market is able to achieve high rates of pollution abatements and significant electricity bill savings. However, a lack of comprehensive information associated with hydrogen technologies present substantial barriers to widespread adoption. Policies should aim to increase transparency and build trust across the stakeholders and the wider community through an ad-hoc circulation of information. In addition, policymakers should consider incentivizing the adoption of hydrogen technologies through subsidies or financial incentives that highlight the economic and environmental benefits.

ABSTRACT. This paper aims to analyze how a succession of extreme climate events affect individual climate change awareness and thus personal intentions to migrate internationally. Using a wide cross-sectional, individual-level dataset covering most countries of the Middle East and North Africa, it distinguishes between individuals wishing to migrate and individuals wishing to migrate in an irregular way. Three proxies of climate change awareness are considered in order to capture the emotional and the cognitive components of mind. Data on environmental perceptions are then combined with ocial measures of dierent successions of climate hazards. Our results show that a repetition of fast-onset climate hazards raises concern about climate change, but a repetition of slow-onset climate disasters lowers the level of concern. Our findings also show that, when weather anomalies become more frequent, the emotional component of mind is the main driver of illegal migration intentions. On the contrary, people recognizing the relevance of national government in ghting climate change do not wish to migrate abroad. Lastly, the empirical analysis demonstrates that, among aware individuals, the increasing repetition of climate shocks is changing the gender dimension of international migratory flows. For countries more exposed to climate change, higher climate change awareness boosts irregular migration among women.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this paper is to present a quantitative analysis of the costs and the benefits associated with the implementation of energy efficiency measures in residential buildings, specifically focusing on the recast Energy Performance of Building Directive (EPBD). To this end, we employ novel open-source microdata on Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) of two Italian regions (Lombardy and Piedmont), which provide information on dwellings’ current energy class and recommendations of the necessary retrofits to reach a higher energy class, as well as CO2 emissions and energy consumption. We estimate a total expenditure of €362.1 billion to take Lombardy’s and Piedmont’s residential stock to at least energy class D, which is about 61% of the two regions’ GDP and about 19% of Italy’s GDP. As for the benefits, households are estimated to save €3.9 billion yearly in Lombardy and €1.6 billion in Piedmont, and CO2-equivalent emissions are estimated to drop by 8 million tons in Lombardy and 3.3 million tons in Piedmont.

ABSTRACT. The digital divide represents one of the many facets of socio-economic inequalities, creating a wedge between citizens with the means and ability to reap the benefits related to modern information and communication technologies (ICTs) and those who lack these resources and skills. Among its determinants at the individual and more aggregate level, space-specific factors, including the quality of regional institutions, may affect its geographical breakdown. In this paper we exploit data covering 181 European cities for the period 2008-2017, examining the spatial distribution of the within-city digital divide and how this relates to several local characteristics. In particular, we focus on the interplay between geographic variables and institutional quality at the local level. Within-city digital divide is computed using individual-level data on European citizens thus allowing to account for a set of individual characteristics that the literature has identified as relevant determinants. These include gender, age, education level, occupational information, among others. Our paper sheds light both on the individual level determinants of the within-city digital divide, and considers how the uneven spatial distribution of the across-cities digital divide is related to local institutional, economic and social characteristics. Implications of our work can help inform local policy makers, who increasingly rely on digital solutions in urban policy planning, to consider the existence of a local digital divide among citizens and adopt corrective measures to help achieve digital urban policies’ full potential. Our empirical results document a negative association between the quality of local institutions and the within-city digital divide. Results are robust to a number of alternative linear specifications, as well as to the use of historical instruments.

ABSTRACT. Local institutions are crucial in fostering economic progress. This article assesses the impact of administrative capacity on the speed of public spending at several levels of government. Administrative capacity serves as a foundation for institutional quality and plays a critical role in enhancing the efficiency of local institutions in providing public services and managing finances. Using a sample of about 60,000 public projects co-funded by European funds in the period 2010-2019, the empirical analysis considers ‘internal’ and ‘external’ administrative factors contributing to spending speed. Project duration is used as an inverse proxy for spending speed. Preliminary results highlight the fundamental role of administrative capacity and institutional quality in shaping spending speed, with administrative capacity mediating the impact of institutional quality.

ABSTRACT. The spread of digital technologies is radically and rapidly transforming economies and societies globally, and the relevance of the issue is also recognized in the political agenda of different countries. This paper aims to investigate the impact of digital transformation on productivity growth emphasizing the role that the quality of institutions plays in this relationship. We use a panel dynamic framework on a sample of 156 European regions over the 2011-2020 period. Our results show a positive impact of digitalization on labor productivity growth. We also find an indirect effect of digitalization mediated by the quality of institutions and human capital: poor institutions affect changes in productivity by preventing local human capital and digital technologies (access to the internet) from translating into higher productivity.

ABSTRACT. Geopolitical risk (GPR) is a pervasive element in many countries, including the European Union (EU), but evidence is limited on the influence of GPR on the effectiveness of structural policies. This paper assembles new data on the EU cohesion policy and applies a heterogeneous coefficient approach to study the impact of GPR originating from China and the US on the effectiveness of the EU structural funds for manufacturing activities. Our results, which are robust to alternative specifications, suggest that a raise of GPR translates in a reduction of the effectiveness of the EU funds. The influence of GPR differs when looking at risk originating from the US and China, and it shows country-specific patterns across Europe. We also document that a raise of GPR diminishes the expected returns of the NGEU funds across Europe up to 1% of potential growth in the industrial sector. The policy implications of our study are also discussed.

ABSTRACT. This paper studies the effects of sovereign debt inflows on the allocation of subnational grants by the central government. We focus on a natural experiment made available by the unanticipated inclusion of South Africa into the Citigroup World Government Bond Index (WGBI) -one of the major international sovereign debt indices- leading to an increase in capital inflows in the country. Using data on South African municipal finance, over the period 2009-2017, we find that the national government allocated more resources to all municipalities after the inclusion. However, while the birth places of the South African cabinet members were normally favored by the government, after a relaxing of the budget constraint, the pattern of government subnational grants is reversed. In other words, we find evidence of some redistribution to other (non birth) more socially economic vulnerable municipalities.

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates the impact of a 2014 reform that extended term limits for mayors of Italian towns with population under 3,000 residents, transitioning from two to three consecutive terms. Exploiting the fact that the reform was not anticipated by incumbent second-term mayors, I estimate separately three main channels through which this policy shift may have impacted local government performance: mayors’ tenure, electoral accountability, and electoral selection. My results indicate that the overall effect of the reform on voters’ welfare was negative. In particular, I uncover a negative tenure effects in the speed of payments in investment spending and in the supply of general administrative service. Specifically, third-term mayors exhibit a decline in performance compared to their second-term. A possible explanation for this performance drop is a decrease in motivation that arise during the concluding stretch of extended tenures as mayor of a small municipality. In such contexts, the mayor’s job tend to become repetitive and less engaging over time. My findings can be of relevance for policymakers contemplating similar reforms for small subnational local governments.

ABSTRACT. We study the electoral impact of trade sanctions against Russia following the invasion of Ukraine. We measure the impact using Italian electoral data from 2018 and 2022 general elections at the municipal level through a shift-share approach, attributing the sector-level export shock to each municipality according to its employment composition. Our results show that votes to Lega (the most pro-Russian party in Italy) increase by 3.8 percentage points for every 1,000 Euro of Russian per-capita export shock at the municipal level. Votes to other parties and turnout do not appear to be affected.

ABSTRACT. This study delves into Political Legislation Cycles (PLC) within Italian regional governance from 2000 to 2022, building upon Padovano and Sy's (2024) comparative analysis. The PLC theory highlights a dynamic distortion in policy decisions, driven by electoral incentives prompting legislators to concentrate the approval of laws near the end of the regional legislature. Focusing on Italian regions, this research sheds light on how fiscal decentralization influences legislative behavior. Our findings reveal discernible legislative cycles primarily within regions with an ordinary statute (RSOs), characterized by lower fiscal autonomy and competencies compared to the special tatute (RSS) regions. Thus, fiscal accountability emerges as a pivotal determinant of legislative cycles. This conclusion is reinforced by the observation that legislative cycles magnitude is more pronounced in economically disadvantaged regions in central and southern Italy compared to wealthier northern regions.

ABSTRACT. Successful economies rely upon effective lawmaking. Representatives must be effective legislators—able to craft and pass new laws—and voters must choose to (re)elect these effective legislators, particularly when circumstances demand new laws. Analyzing election outcomes from the U.S. House of Representatives, legislators’ effectiveness, and exogenous increases in import competition from China between 2002 and 2010, we document a conditional relationship between legislative effectiveness and electoral success. In districts exposed to large trade shocks, incumbent legislators who were more effective legislators were more likely to continue to be elected compared to less effective legislators. Instead, in districts exposed to small trade shocks, incumbent legislators who were more effective legislators were less likely to continue to be elected compared to less effective legislators. We interpret and provide evidence that this result is driven by trade shock exposure affecting whether voters demand policy change and, in turn, voters’ decisions to (re)elect more or less effective legislators.

ABSTRACT. This paper evaluates the effects of corruption on electoral volatility. I address this issues by constructing a new dataset, covering the electoral outcomes for all Italian provinces in the five elections occurred from 2006 to 2022. To identify the causal effect of corruption, I rely on an IV strategy based on historical instrument, exploiting the idea that electoral volatility across provinces have not been affected just by turnout and the economic performances over the life of a government. I find that corruption negatively affects the political stability, suggesting that the higher level of corruption, the higher the electoral volatility.

ABSTRACT. This article examines how differently the family background affects the choice of sons and daughters to move to another region for tertiary education and how the mother’s role on student mobility differs from that of the father. We apply multinomial logistic regression to longitudinal data on high school-university transition regarding southern students enrolled at university in Italy. The results are an interplay amongst parental education and occupation, parental and descendant gender, and geographical mobility trajectories. The mother’s education is less dominant than the father’s education, the opposite occurs for occupation. There exists a gender imitation effect: mothers with higher position are more dominant on student mobility for daughters than for sons. Southern students from privileged families are more inclined to migrate for tertiary education; but we also show that disadvantaged parents may also invest in student mobility to allow a better social position to the descendants.

ABSTRACT. This study examines the relationship between the economic cycle and higher education demand among young adults in a set of European countries with different welfare regimes. Using data from 2005 to 2021 from the EU-SILC dataset, we focus on individuals aged 18 to 29 who have completed at least secondary education that still live with their parents. We find a countercyclical pattern in university participation during economic crises, with an increase of 2.4% in the probability of attending university. Significant countercyclical patterns emerge in countries with Mediterranean, post-socialist, and liberal welfare systems, while countries with socio-democratic and corporativist welfare systems show an a-cyclical but no statistically significant relationship between crisis and university attendance. The response to economic downturns varies by household income, with young adults from more affluent families showing a more pronounced countercyclical effect. Considering the available alternative activities to young people (working, studying, being unemployed or inactive), we observe that the predicted probability of being a worker decreases while the probability of being a university student or unemployed increases. This pattern holds especially for Mediterranean and liberal regime, with important relative variations across income tertiles.

ABSTRACT. This paper estimates the impact of access to administrative data on the career trajectories of young scholars in Economics. We examine the VisitINPS Scholars program, which grants access to the Italian social security institute (INPS) administrative data based on the quality of applicants’ research projects. Using a Two-Way Fixed-Effect (TWFE) approach, we leverage data from about 200 Principal Investigators over the period 2010-2023. Results indicate that accessing administrative data and being enrolled in the VisitINPS program does not increase the quantity of peer-reviewed article but it increases the probability to publish in highly-ranked Economic journals. We also find a positive effect on conference participation and career advancement. The timing of the effects we find is consistent with young scholars having access to administrative data first, then participating to conference, being promoted and finally getting their article published in highly-raked reviews. Our results survive a battery of robustness checks including a TWFE-RDD where we attenuate as much as possible any confounding influence of individual heterogeneity.

ABSTRACT. In many research systems hiring decisions are increasingly relying on the evaluation of research quality defined by bibliometric indicators computed on the publication record of candidates. The paper discusses the consequences of competitive selections based on bibliometric indicators that we assume to be correlated to, but not coinciding with, the true quality of researchers. We build a simple agent-based model representing a hypothetic research institu- tion tasked with regularly hiring new recruits to replace retiring members. We adopt plausible distributions for the unobservable research quality of candidates and their publicly available bibliometric indicators, and test the results under different assump- tions, primarily the relevance of indicators in the hiring procedure. We show that using exceedingly selective criteria operating on observable proxy indicators of research quality may reduce the actual expected research quality of new hires.

ABSTRACT. Weinvestigate the effect of an Italian non-pharmaceutical policy aimed at counteracting the spread of Covid-19 on the fertility patterns of Italian women, with a focus on abortions (VPTs). In March 2020, the government forbade the performance of a set of “non-essential” activities; hence, we exploit the variability in the share of suspended workers across Italian municipalities to assess the impact of closures on abortion rates (AR), and pregnancy rates turning into live births 9 months later, by means of a quasi-experimental strategy. Relying on outstanding administrative data on VPTs and births, we find that, the overall drops in abortions due to social distancing notwithstanding, municipalities in the fourth quartile of the suspended workers’ share distribution saw a positive effect on quarterly ARs by a value between 10-13% the average rate before the pandemic, compared to those belonging to lower sections of the distribution. Such difference is driven by industrial suspensions. A non-significant effect is retrieved on births. We make use of relevant socio-economic characteristics to inquire about the channels through which the effect might loom: 1) a reproductive health-related reason, due to a relative shift in unwanted pregnancies given more time available at home for couples; 2) to parity of pregnancies, the socioeconomic insecurity triggered by the policy, added up to the bleak pandemic situation. Whereas the relevant mechanism seems to be the former, the analysis makes room for the fact that the unstable economic environment might have played some role; for the first time with respect to the literature using the same data, we exploit information on past reproductive behavior of the aborting women to shed light on the phenomenon. The effect on abortions is driven both by women who are married and not in professional condition. Plus, and more interestingly, by those who previously had children or abortions. By contrast, the occupational sector of the aborting women is independent on the sector of job suspension. The work may contribute to the knowledge about Italian birth control practices and fertility responsiveness to reproductive care-unrelated public policies.

ABSTRACT. We examine the impact of age-based minimum wages on health outcomes of young workers in the UK using data from the British Household Panel Survey and Understanding Society (1999-2021) and exploiting a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) framework. By focusing on the health-related effects of minimum wage discontinuities, we consider the National Minimum Wage (NMW) regulation introduced in the UK in 1999 to examine how a possible exogenous increase in income may affect the health outcome of younger workers. The UK National Minimum Wage (NMW) regulation provides a very good setting to identify causal effects of minimum wage on health by exploiting a RDD framework. However, since the youth minimum wages can be described as a stepwise increasing function of a worker's calendar age, we have to deal with multiple cutoff we estimating our RDD models. We address this matter by adopting both a standard “normalizing and pooling” approach and the novel “cumulative multiple cutoffs” approach by Cattaneo et al. (2020, 2021). In our empirical analysis we consider as dependent variables three different measures of health, that is physical, mental and general health. Our main results suggest that the increase in minimum wage has a positive effect on the physical health of workers when they turn 21, but it does not have significant effects at the other age cutoffs. The magnitude of this effect is larger if we adopt the novel “cumulative multiple cutoffs” approach by Cattaneo et al. (2020, 2021) instead of the standard “normalizing and pooling” approach. Our findings remain robust across various specification tests.

ABSTRACT. The paper aims to investigate the role of occupation-specific health hazards as potential drivers of individual choices in terms of (early) retirement. To this end, we compute two sets of indicators: one at the individual level, aiming to proxy the individual's health status, and one at the occupation level, aiming to capture the job features expected to impact health the most. First, relying on SHARE data, we construct synthetic indicators for individual health over two dimensions: physical health and cognitive functioning. We exploit information on self-reported health, healthcare use, and cognitive abilities, to identify what factors better capture the ageing-related health deterioration. Second, we use O*Net data to identify occupation-specific features—abilities, skills, work context, and activities—that mostly impact the worker’s health over each dimension; we compute indicators of work intensity for every occupation. We match the individual-level information from SHARE on health and labour supply with occupational hazards using the ISCO codes and the ISCO-O*Net crosswalk. We assess how health and cognitive limitations affect the workers’ retirement decisions and address endogeneity concerns for health and cognitive functioning. We devise a two-step procedure exploiting the occupation-specific features from O*NET as an exogenous source of variation for health conditions. First, we predict (indicators of) health and cognitive limitations from the regressions of the two multidimensional indexes on a battery of selected job characteristics available in the O*NET platform meant to have an impact on either health domain. Second, we include the predicted indicators of health and cognitive limitations in the regression for retirement decisions, to investigate to what extent deteriorating health conditions may shape pathways to retirement. Our preliminary estimates show that, after controlling for individual-specific and time-invariant characteristics, workers with higher physical and cognitive impairments significantly anticipate their retirement from the labour market. We find significant differences between men and women. Understanding the role of occupational risks in shaping labour supply and retirement choices might enhance the implementation of targeted policies in support of the most at-risk workers to favour active ageing at work and smooth trajectories to retirement.

ABSTRACT. Using administrative data from the Italian National Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work (INAIL), this study investigates the causal impact of news about fatal workplace accidents on the reporting of workplace injuries. Employing a difference-in-differences approach with matching methods, the findings indicate that news of a fatal workplace accident leads to approximately a 6% increase in the reporting of less severe injuries in the week following the fatal accident. Additionally, an analysis of Google Trends data, used as a proxy for national media coverage, provides weak evidence suggesting that media attention contributes to this increase. Consistent with the literature, these findings suggest a persistent issue of under-reporting in workplace injuries. These results highlight the potential role of media coverage in influencing injury reporting behavior and emphasize the need for improved data accuracy and increased awareness to enhance workplace safety policies

ABSTRACT. The efficiency of revenue collection is a critical concern for local governments, impacting their financial health and service delivery capabilities. By exploiting the interoperability of different databases, this study introduces a novel index to measure the efficiency of TARI (waste fee) collection across Italian municipalities. We employ this index as the response variable in a machine learning application using the Classification and Regression Tree (CART) algorithm to generate a regression tree model. Our analysis reveals key determinants to capture the cross-municipalities variability of this new index and create a partition of Italian municipalities based on their efficiency of TARI collection and their socio-economic characteristics, such as per capita taxable income, municipality size, and citizens’ tax compliance attitudes. The regression tree results not only provide a detailed characterization of the TARI collection phenomenon but also offer practical insights for public administration stakeholders. Municipalities can leverage these insights to identify their group classification, compare their efficiency against the group average (gap analysis), and implement targeted improvements. Additionally, the model’s outcomes facilitate the prediction of missing data, assigning the mean efficiency of the corresponding group to municipalities with incomplete records. This comprehensive approach aims to enhance the understanding and management of TARI collection efficiency, ultimately supporting better fiscal governance at the local level.

ABSTRACT. The financial crisis of local governments poses substantial hurdles to public finance and economic resilience. In Italy, the enactment of a specialized insolvency procedure for municipalities in 1989 introduced a parametric methodology aimed at identifying municipalities in financial distress. This study investigates the predictability of municipal financial crises through a Machine Learning approach by integrating both data used by the parametric government monitoring model as well as additional administrative. By analyzing administrative data from 2018, the study seeks to predict financial instability or recovery from 2019 to 2024 across Italian municipalities, with particular emphasis on central southern Italy (3,500 municipalities). Notably, the Random Forest algorithm emerges as the foremost predictive model. The core determinants of municipal default encompass a spectrum of indicators concerning municipal budgets, encompassing facets such as trade debt management, collection efficiency, and constraints on current surplus. Furthermore, socio-economic factors including unemployment rates, total population, and taxpayer demographics emerge as additional determinants stressing the importance of the tax base. Institutional quality indicators also exert significant influence on crisis prediction, indicating the necessity for a holistic assessment inclusive of factors beyond conventional fiscal metrics. Interestingly, the study reveals that certain deficit indicators delineated in existing legislation governing local authority organization do not hold substantial predictive power. This underscores the exigency for a comprehensive evaluation framework encompassing diverse factors that influence local finance beyond traditional deficit metrics.

ABSTRACT. Municipalities play a critical role in providing public goods and services, relying on a dual revenue system combining transfers from higher government tiers and own taxes and fees. This paper introduces machine learning to predict municipal personal income tax surcharge within the Italian context. The analysis employs eight machine learning algorithms (Elastic Net, Extreme Gradient Boosting, Flexible Discriminant Analysis, k-Nearest Neighbors, Na¨ıve Bayes, Neural Network, Random Forest, and Support Vector Regression) and relies on data available from different public source for the years 2018 and 2019. Random Forest emerges as the best algorithm in out-of-samples prediction performances. Important predictors of municipal taxation include institutional quality indexes, geographical, financial, and socio-economic indicators. The study contributes to the understanding of local fiscal decision-making and suggests directions for future research.

ABSTRACT. This paper shows how to design effective location-based policies. In the context of European regional policy, we adopt algorithms to predict the regions that should be targeted because they will use subsidies to increase output and employment. Then, we use a fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design (f-RDD) to document that EU money is effective only for our predicted recipients. Our approach is easily implementable by policy makers, because it is based on publicly available data and off-the-shelf algorithms.

ABSTRACT. La delega per la riforma del sistema fiscale prevede l’introduzione di un regime Ires di aliquota ridotta per le società che investono, assumono e introducono schemi di azionariato per i dipendenti, capitalizzandosi attraverso l’accantonamento degli utili. Alle imprese sarebbe lasciata l’opzione di non applicare tale regime ed avvalersi in alternativa di specifici incentivi fiscali per investimenti e occupazione. Il nuovo regime non è stato introdotto nella prima fase di attuazione della delega. È stato invece abrogato l’Aiuto alla Crescita Economica (ACE) ed implementato un incentivo per le assunzioni a tempo indeterminato. In questo articolo, sono analizzati gli effetti del regime Ires dell’aliquota ridotta su costo del capitale, incentivi alla modifica della struttura finanziaria e gettito. Il nuovo regime viene inoltre confrontato con analoghi schemi di tassazione introdotti in passato e con l’ACE. Dall’analisi emerge che il regime della Mini-Ires ha degli effetti rilevanti sul costo del capitale per investimenti finanziati con utili accantonati e può favorire un maggiore capitalizzazione delle imprese. Tuttavia, lo stimolo alla maggiore capitalizzazione è attenuato, oltre che dall’esclusione dall’agevolazione delle nuove emissioni di azioni, dalla possibilità di distribuire dopo due anni gli utili precedentemente accantonati e dall’esistenza di alcuni scenari in cui è possibile godere dei benefici fiscali del regime anche finanziando l’investimento con debito. L’analisi delle aliquote medie di tassazione evidenzia la possibilità di rilevanti perdite di gettito in alcuni degli scenari possibili. Nel confronto con la Mini-Ires della legge di bilancio per il 2019, il regime della delega appare superiore sul fronte dell’impatto sul costo del capitale e del riequilibrio fiscale tra fonti di finanziamento. Nel confronto con un sistema ACE al massimo del suo potenziale, non è chiaro in aggregato l’effetto complessivo sul costo del capitale, sulla base del fatto che l’ACE si applica ad una parte più ampia dell’attivo dell’impresa e ad una percentuale più ampia delle fonti di finanziamento. Considerando che la Mini-Ires sarebbe alternativa ad altri incentivi agli investimenti e all’occupazione, esiste la concreta possibilità di un aumento del costo del capitale in aggregato, in seguito all’abrogazione dell’ACE, anche se depotenziata. Nel passaggio dall’ACE alla Mini-Ires c’è infine un deciso peggioramento sul fronte dell’asimmetria di trattamento fiscale tra debito e mezzi propri, connesso al fatto che la Mini-Ires si applica solo agli utili accantonati e solo a certe tipologie di investimento, alla libertà di scelta della struttura finanziaria dell’investimento dopo due anni e alla possibilità di accedere ai benefici dell’aliquota ridotta anche finanziando l’investimento con debito sin dall’inizio.

ABSTRACT. Evidence of profit shifting by large companies operating in international markets has been well documented in the economic literature, but tackling the problem at the international level requires strong coordination between countries, which has always seemed utopian. The recent agreement on Global Minimum Tax of MNEs is therefore a very important step towards curbing profit shifting and limiting harmful tax competition. In this paper, using data from the MEDITA model, we evaluate the available evidence on profit shifting by firms operating in Italy and provide a first assessment of the impact of the Global Minimum Tax in terms of additional payments by the largest firms. However, the additional taxation does not seem to be sufficient to equalize the tax burden between different types of firms.

ABSTRACT. The budget law for 2024 introduced a super-deduction of the labour cost for employment in-creases in permanent jobs from corporate income tax base (CIT). The tax-cut aimed at in-creasing employment is higher for eligible workers who are in a poor labour market situa-tion. This paper addresses the question of how to comprehensively measure the tax wedge on the employer side, including employer contributions and corporate income tax. Based on a profit maximisation modelling approach, we extend the conventional measure of the tax wedge on labour, which excludes the tax component arising from the non-neutral tax treat-ment of labour under the corporate income tax. We examine the evolution of both the CIT and the contributory component of the employer tax wedge over the years 2006-2024, taking into account differences in the tax treatment of different types of jobs (temporary versus per-manent). In addition, we take into account the main reliefs aimed at providing stronger hir-ing incentives to disadvantaged workers (youth, women, residents of southern areas), includ-ing those provided by the recent approved “Decreto Coesione”. Our results show that the overall tax burden on labour fell by 6.2% on permanent jobs from 2007 to 2015. The tax re-duction granted by the newly introduced super deduction from the CIT of labour costs for employment increases in 2024 is 0.9% (1.3 for disadvantaged workers).We show that the magnitude of the incentive effect on the tax wedge is comparable to that associated with pre-vious tax allowances for the same policy objective, e.g. employment increases. Overall, the tax benefit for hiring young people will be lower in 2024 than in 2023. In contrast, the total tax burden that employers will have to bear for hiring women will be lower from September 2024 than in 2023. For hiring employees in southern regions, the reduction in the total tax burden for the employer will be higher than in 2023, but only for companies with up to 10 employees.

ABSTRACT. Changes to loss offset rules are often used as a fiscal stimulus measure in times of crisis to alleviate firms' constraints and support the economy. The effect of these measures has been assessed in the literature using large listed firms, but there is no evidence on the effect of these policies on small private firms so far. We study a temporary change in the loss carry-back period implemented in the Netherlands over 2009-2011 using administrative and tax return data on small private corporations. Using a difference-in-difference set up and matching techniques, we show that an additional year of carry-back has a significant effect on treated firms' investments, but no significant effect on firms' survival, employment and profits. The positive effect on investments is not driven by equity injections but rather by debt increases. Crucially, the significance of the effect on investments is conditional on the size of the additional carry-back.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, we document the extent of employer abuse of power and characterize the employers most likely to engage in abusive relationships with their employees. We leverage an Italian reform that changed the submission process for voluntary resignations from a paper-based to an online system. This reform aimed to curb the illegal practice of requiring workers to sign undated resignation letters, which employers could use at their discretion to avoid the costs associated with formal dismissals - a clear manifestation of power abuse. Using difference-in-difference estimation to identify causal effects, we document that resignations declined more in firms with higher proportions of vulnerable workers, operating in weaker local labor markets, and with lower productivity. We also show that the reform effectively increased workers’ access to rights, such as maternal leave, thereby successfully rebalancing power within firms.

ABSTRACT. We study the implications of traditional gender norms for legislators' engagement with women's issues. We leverage rich data from Facebook on the popularity of gender-related interests (processed using machine learning algorithms) to develop a granular Gender Norms Index (GNI) at the municipal level within Italy, a geographical resolution that would otherwise be unavailable. After validating our index, we leverage this local variation in norms to isolate their impact on legislators’ policy activity in the Italian Parliament. We show that while female legislators generally sponsor more gender-related bills than their male counterparts, their engagement is substantially smaller if they were born in a gender-conservative town. This result persists even when comparing legislators within the same party, constituency or with similar characteristics. The absence of such a systematic impact on non-gender legislation further reinforces the causal interpretation of our estimates. Supplementary evidence on voting behavior suggests that traditional gender norms also negatively affect the passage of pro-equality legislation. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of social norms and sexist culture in lawmaking, thereby slowing down reform for the expansion of women’s rights.

ABSTRACT. In this project, we examine the role of family-friendly workplaces by exploiting administrative data on the career of workers in the private and the public sector. First, we provide novel but descriptive evidence of the child penalty in Italy and how it relates to differences in family-friendliness across workplaces. In the second part of the paper, we study the impact of making workplaces more family-friendly on workers’ and firms’ outcomes. Because making workplaces more family-friendly may impose a financial burden on firms, we then examine a policy designed to reduce the costs that firms bear when their workers take parental leave.

ABSTRACT. This paper studies the effects of a hiring subsidy introduced in Italy in 2013 with the goal of stimulating female employment. We employ a staggered event-study design to investigate the dynamic effect of the subsidy on firm and worker outcomes, focusing in particular on firms hiring decisions. Results show that i) subsidized hires are more likely to remain employed at the firm in the long term, ii) firms that use the subsidy hire women with longer non-employment spells, including mothers, and iii) subsidized hires are positively selected compared to the average hire at the firm. We argue that the subsidy could operate as a mechanism allowing firms to learn about the potential productivity of disadvantaged groups

ABSTRACT. Brain drain is a key policy concern for many countries. In this paper we study whether tax incentives are an effective policy to attract high-skilled expatriates back to their home country, exploiting a generous income tax break for Italian returnees. Using administrative data and a Triple Differences design, we find that eligible individuals are 27% more likely to return to Italy. Additionally, we uncover significant effects throughout the wage distribution, revealing that tax-induced migration is a broad phenomenon beyond top earners. A cost-benefit analysis shows that the tax scheme can pay for itself by targeting young high-skilled individuals.

ABSTRACT. Exploiting the age-at-enrollment policies in 16 German states as exogenous source of variation, I examine whether the schooling of the oldest child in a migrant household affects parents’ integration. My analysis links administrative records on primary school enrollment cutoff dates with micro data from the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP). Using a regression discontinuity design around the school enrollment cutoff and an instrumental variable approach I show that children’s schooling improves the integration of parents along several dimensions, such as labor market outcomes, financial worries, and German language skills. Labor market outcomes are most positively affected for mothers. Additional analysis of underlying mechanisms suggests that results are driven by gains in disposable time and exposure to the German language and culture.

ABSTRACT. We study immigrant assimilation in terms of earnings dynamics and patterns of intergenerational transmission in permanent earnings by immigrant generation and neighborhood segregation levels. We estimate comparable sibling correlations across native and immigrant groups, but these seem to be explained by different factors. As immigrants assimilate, their intergenerational transmission mechanisms also become similar to natives. However, less assimilated immigrants experience weaker earnings transmission, a higher persistence of neighborhood effects, and a slower assimilation trajectory.