ABSTRACT. We study tax competition when multinational profits are stochastic and governments operate under the OECD/G20 GloBE minimum tax. We develop a threecountry framework in which a multinational faces correlated earnings, chooses leverage endogenously, and shifts profits through intragroup debt. Three results emerge. First, a novel correlation externality: higher correlation across affiliates raises aggregate volatility, which (through the firm’s endogenous default option) lowers optimal leverage, attenuates base erosion, and pushes equilibrium tax rates upward rather than downward. The sign is opposite to the naive risk-amplification intuition and is invisible in deterministic models. Second, the coupon-feedback channel generated by endogenous financing turns tax rates into strategic substitutes throughout the empirically relevant range, reversing the strategic complementarity that deterministic models deliver uniformly. Third, whether GloBE binds is endogenous to the technology of profit shifting. We illustrate this with three purely illustrative calibrations of the concealment-cost parameter n, chosen to span the qualitative regimes: with low concealment costs (n = 0.5) unconstrained Nash rates fall below the floor and GloBE binds ubiquitously; with high costs (n = 2.0) they lie well above and the floor is slack; at the intermediate value (n = 1.0) the unconstrained Nash crosses the floor inside the correlation grid. The binding regime of the minimum tax therefore depends on the structural difficulty of profit shifting, not on the GloBE rate alone. Ignoring risk mischaracterises both tax competition and the effects of minimum taxation.

ABSTRACT. To prevent systemic fragmentation, the Side-by-Side Agreement allows the US to retain its autonomous tax regime, shielding its multinationals from the OECD’s 15% Global Minimum Tax. This paper evaluates how this asymmetric implementation alters global tax revenue and competitiveness, utilizing 2022 OECD Country-by-Country Reports. A first analysis quantifies that this exemption for US MNEs leads to approximately $30.05 billion in uncollected top-up tax globally, at the expense of market economies. Furthermore, a dynamic estimation of profit semi-elasticity projects that this asymmetry will systematically drain Investment Hubs implementing their own Qualified Domestic Minimum Top-up Tax, such as Singapore, Switzerland, and Ireland, resulting in an estimated outflow of roughly $168 billion in profits. Historical patterns suggest that this shifting tax base is susceptible to trigger reallocation toward non-participating hub jurisdictions like Puerto Rico and Bermuda. Ultimately, these findings suggest that the Side-by-Side compromise possibly alters the geography of profit shifting rather than ending it, resulting in a dual defeat for European economies.

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates tax avoidance concentration and distribution using public country-by-country reporting (CbCr) data of multinational firms. First, this study examines the relationship between effective tax rates (ETRs) and reported profits to identify profit-shifting behavior after the OECD BEPS reform. Moreover, a set of alternative metrics is applied in this study to explain the distribution and concentration of corporate tax avoidance. The results show that tax avoidance is persistent, despite increased transparency. Multinational firms shift profits to low-tax jurisdictions. Profit shifting leads to substantial tax revenue losses for the headquarters countries, which are highly concentrated and unevenly distributed across countries and industries, with tax avoidance heavily skewed toward the largest multinationals.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, we examine the impact of High-Speed Railway (HSR) connectivity on interregional patient mobility for healthcare in Italy. Using an unbalanced panel of 111 NUTS-3 units (Italian provinces) over the period 1999–2019, we construct measures of patient inflows, outflows, and net mobility for acute inpatient discharges across regions using data from the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat). To identify causal effects, we exploit the staggered opening of HSR stations within an extended two-way fixed effects (ETWFE) difference-in-differences (DiD) framework. Our results show that access to HSR significantly increases patient mobility, with economically meaningful and statistically robust effects. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that these effects are primarily driven by increases in patient inflows toward Northern Italian provinces, suggesting that improved connectivity reinforces existing spatial disparities in healthcare utilization.

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates how regional differences in the effective implementation of Italy’s Essential Levels of Care (Livelli Essenziali di Assistenza, LEA) relate to private health expenditure, using a large administrative dataset of more than 6.6 million taxpayer–year observations and exploiting substantial cross-regional variation in LEA quality. While higher public health standards might be expected to reduce the need for privately financed care, theory also allows for the opposite mechanism: well-functioning public systems may increase contacts with providers, detection of needs and care intensity, thereby stimulating complementary private spending. To test these competing hypotheses, we compare findings from pooled, fixed effects, and two-part models. Results show that higher regional LEA performance is systematically associated with lower individual out-of-pocket health expenditure. In pooled and fixed-effects linear models, a 1-point increase in the lagged LEA reduces annual private spending by approximately €0.4–0.8 per person. Two-part models yield even larger combined marginal effects, showing that LEA quality crowds out private spending along both the extensive margin (lower probability of any positive expenditure) and the intensive margin (lower conditional spending among users), with the effect being concentrated mainly on the prevention component. The evidence supports the crowding-out hypothesis and highlights the role of effective LEA implementation as a financial protection device in a decentralised universal healthcare system, which can be crucial to increase low-income households’ access to care.

ABSTRACT. In many settings, administrative data record choices only for participants in a public program, while participation outside the public sector (e.g., private provision or non-use) is observed only through aggregates or ignored. We propose a structural framework that jointly models participation in a public program and choice among public providers, using external epidemiological information to discipline the outside option. Using Italian discharge data, our method yields stronger estimated substitution patterns and economically meaningful responses on the extensive margin than conventional approach. The framework is applicable to a wide class of public programs characterized by partial observability of participation.

ABSTRACT. Regional inequality has regained prominence in European policy debates, and Italy provides a salient case due to its persistent territorial disparities. In response, the National Strategy for Inner Areas (SNAI) was introduced to address depopulation and limited access to essential services in marginal municipalities. This study examines the impact of SNAI on employment dynamics, with a focus on gender differences, using Compulsory Communication data and a staggered Difference-in-Differences design. The results point to largely null employment effects, with some evidence of modest negative impacts for male workers, raising questions about the strategy’s effectiveness in fostering local labor market development.

ABSTRACT. We integrate spatial dependence into the analysis of the role of culture for economic development and estimate both the role of regional history and geographic location. Our approach allows the analysis of the direct effects of a region’s culture on its development, and its indirect effects on neighboring regions. Ore finding show that, while prior research attributes regional development disparities to cultural heritage, spatial effects—such as income clustering—significantly mediate this impact. Results show that neglecting spatial dependence overstates the role of cultural heritage in EU regional development: when regional interdependence is accounted for, the direct historical impact of culture diminishes by over 60%. Furthermore, regions with strong cultural endowments positively influence neighboring areas, reinforcing income clustering patterns. However, not all cultural traits equally affect neighboring regions: traits such as personal agency and respect for others exhibit stronger spatial effects on economic outcomes. Our analysis of data from 2017–2022 underscores the structural nature of these interactions, highlighting the enduring influence of cultural and spatial factors on regional development. By incorporating both cultural and spatial dynamics, this research provides fresh insights into the mechanisms driving income convergence and divergence across the EU. These findings emphasize the importance of policies that harness cultural heritage and geographic positioning to foster balanced regional growth.

ABSTRACT. Geopolitical tensions and economic linkages can influence the effectiveness of regional development policies, generating heterogenous territorial outcomes. We construct novel trade-adjusted measures of exposure to geopolitical risk for European regions and provide evidence on how geopolitical shocks affect the impact of Cohesion Policy over the past two decades. Our results indicate that geopolitical risk significantly reduces the growth impact of Cohesion Policy, with an average decline between 16% and 22%. Importantly, these effects are not spatially uniform but vary across and within European countries. Territorial differences are partly explained by regions’ positioning in global value chains and by the intensity of foreign direct investment. These findings highlight the relevance of external geopolitical conditions for the effectiveness of place-based development policies

ABSTRACT. Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) are expected to play a key role in the energy transition by promoting collective self-consumption, local flexibility, and greater integration of renewable generation. However, their effective functioning depends not only on regulatory and technical conditions, but also on members’ willingness to cooperate and align individual behaviour with collective benefits. This paper investigates how incentive sharing, contextual framing, monitoring, and enforcement mechanisms shape cooperation within a stylised energy community. We conduct a laboratory experiment with fixed producer-consumer couples, combining an ultimatum game with a repeated real-effort cooperative game. Producers and consumers first decide how to split a collective incentive, while consumers subsequently choose whether to exert costly effort to maximise shared benefits. Across treatments, we vary the presence of energy-community framing and the availability of renegotiation through punishment and reward mechanisms. The results show that framing does not significantly affect incentive allocation or consumers’ task participation, but it influences producers’ monitoring decisions: neutral framing substantially reduces the likelihood of control. Cooperation is not systematically enhanced by stricter enforcement or renegotiation opportunities; instead, consumer effort is mainly shaped by time dynamics consistent with learning and fatigue. Enforcement mechanisms operate asymmetrically: punishment does not increase subsequent cooperation, whereas rewards positively affect consumers’ future task performance. Behavioural traits further mediate these dynamics, with trust associated with reward-based enforcement and cooperative attitudes linked to punishment. Overall, the findings suggest that simple institutional arrangements based on fixed rules and limited enforcement may sustain cooperation as effectively as more complex negotiation-based mechanisms, while reducing organisational costs in renewable energy communities.

ABSTRACT. Agri-food quality governance is increasingly shifting from territorially embedded certification systems towards hybrid architectures in which geographical indications and environmental labelling coexist as competing quality signals. This paper investigates how these signals generate value and shape consumer choices in the context of Italian chestnut products. We develop a discrete choice experiment with Italian consumers, combining product origin, Local PGI certification, ecosystem-service-based environmental attributes, price and disclosure of Common Agricultural Policy support. The experimental design incorporates personalised product formats and regional matching between respondents and Local PGI products, allowing us to distinguish between territorial familiarity and more generalised quality signalling. The results show that environmental attributes generate substantial willingness to pay, particularly for locally impactful sustainability-related practices. Geographical indications remain highly effective when consumers are matched with products from their own region, but their reputational strength appears spatially bounded. Outside these localised contexts, environmental labels compete effectively with territorial certifications and may reduce the residual advantage of Local PGI products. Market-share simulations further suggest that environmental information can reorganise competitive dynamics by shifting value creation from territorially embedded reputation towards more scalable sustainability-based quality signals. Finally, disclosure of public support positively affects willingness to pay, suggesting that Common Agricultural Policy support may operate not only as an economic transfer but also as an institutional endorsement of environmental quality. The findings indicate that environmental labels may function as scalable governance instruments within hybrid agri-food quality systems, coordinating sustainability-oriented value creation beyond territorially embedded niche markets.

ABSTRACT. Although consumers may wish to act in environmentally responsible ways, informational barriers often prevent them from accurately understanding the true environmental costs of their consumption choices. In this paper, we investigate how environmental costs, such as CO2 emissions, electric energy consumption, and water usage, affect the intention to purchase secondhand clothing. Using multiple price lists, we measure stated changes in purchasing intention and incentivized choices, as well as willingness to accept (WTA) and willingness to pay (WTP) for vouchers at first-hand versus second-hand clothing stores. We draw on a large, nationally representative sample of Italians (N = 10, 496). First, we find that providing information is effective in promoting secondhand adoption across all types of environmental costs; water-based information generates the strongest effect. Second, we find that pro-environmental behavior amplifies responsiveness to information. However, the need for uniqueness acts as a significant barrier; these individuals require approximately €2 more compensation to switch to secondhand options. Third, local environmental conditions, including water scarcity, energy poverty, and air quality, do not systematically moderate treatment effects. We also found that store proximity influences baseline preferences, but does not moderate the effects of in- formation provision. Our findings indicate that consumers respond to various environmental indicators, demonstrating a particular sensitivity to water usage compared to CO2 emissions. However, significant portions of the public remain disengaged from sustainability information.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines whether large-scale regional development policies can influence fertility behaviour. We study the impact of EU Objective 1 funding—allocated through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the European Social Fund (ESF) — on the probability of conception among women in the United Kingdom. Using longitudinal data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) over the period 1991–2020, we implement a selection-on-observables strategy based on a rich set of individual and household characteristics measured at first observation. To improve comparability and reduce potential bias, we combine entropy balancing with linear parametric analysis. The results indicate that exposure to EU Objective 1 funding increases the probability of conception by approximately 2.7 percentage points. Heterogeneity analyses reveal that fertility responses are concentrated among employed women and those in intermediate and routine occupations, as well as among women in the middle and upper-income terciles. These findings suggest that regional development policies may be linked to fertility behaviour, particularly among women with stronger labour-market attachment and sufficient economic resources to respond to improvements in local economic conditions.

ABSTRACT. This paper estimates the effects of access to early childhood education and care services, combined with receipt of a subsidy to cover childcare fees, on two distinct outcomes, mothers' labour-market participation and fertility, in Tuscany, an Italian Region characterized by high childcare coverage. The research strategy relies on a counterfactual evaluation design with individual matching (nearest-neighbour matching, exact matching), constructed by linking several administrative archives: beneficiaries of the Bonus Asilo Nido, beneficiaries of the Single and Universal Allowance for dependent children (AUU), Single Substitute Statements (DSU) to certificate the Equivalent Economic Situation Indicator (ISEE), and mandatory employment communications (CO). The results show positive and statistically significant effects on the activation of inactive and unemployed mothers, as well as an increase in the probability of having a second child. Positive labour-market effects are also found among women who are employed at childbirth, and are more pronounced for those on fixed-term contracts. The fertility effect is stronger in the middle quintiles of the ISEE distribution and slightly larger among employed mothers. The estimates suggest that expanding childcare coverage and reducing access costs may support female employment and, albeit moderately, fertility.

ABSTRACT. We study the relationship between historical family organization and contemporary preferences and policies for childcare. We focus on two principles of family organization documented in medieval societies: egalitarian inheritance and cohabitation between parents and adult children. These principles are associated with persistent differences in individuals’ intergenerational obligations and reliance on family-based versus external provision of care, which are reflected in attitudes toward public childcare. We examine this relationship using survey data on public childcare preferences among US-born individuals, linked to the family organization prevalent in their ancestors’ countries of origin, together with data on bill sponsorship by members of the US Congress, linked to the ancestral composition of their electoral districts. We document that individuals with ancestries originating from societies characterized by egalitarian inheritance exhibit higher support for public childcare, and that representatives elected in districts with a more egalitarian ancestral composition sponsor more child-related legislation. By contrast, ancestries associated with intergenerational cohabitation are linked to lower support for public childcare and reduced legislative engagement on children’s issues. Our findings highlight the role of historical family organization in shaping political demand for intergenerational welfare policies

ABSTRACT. Applied research treats individual concern with immigration as a strong correlate of right-wing vote choice. We argue that this empirical regularity often conflates two distinct constructs: the salience an individual attaches to the immigration domain, and the substantive position the individual holds within it. Using the ITANES 2022 Panel and specifications that include left–right self-placement throughout, we estimate linear probability and logit models in which salience (a binary indicator of issue priority) and position (a 1–7 scale of immigration restrictiveness) enter side by side. The two are weakly correlated in our data (Spearman −0.17). When entered jointly, salience is statistically indistinguishable from zero on the post-election vote (β̂ = 0.050, p = 0.24), while position remains large and highly significant (β̂ = −0.061, p < 0.001). The position estimate is uniformly robust across logit estimation, provincial clustering of standard errors, sample restrictions, the continuous propensity-to-vote outcome, and every demographic subgroup we examine. The salience effect re-emerges only on the pre-election voting intention, suggesting that what survey-based work attributes to immigration salience is in part a residue of post-electoral rationalization. The 2022 Italian setting is well suited to the exercise: sea arrivals reached the highest level since 2017 (Fondazione ISMU, 2026), but only 4.7% of respondents named immigration among the country’s two top problems. We do not interpret the estimates causally and we resist the strategic-manipulation framing that unconditional readings of similar data have sometimes invited.

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates whether banking scandals erode institutional trust and fuel support for anti-establishment parties. We focus on major banking scandals that occurred in Italy over the period 2008–2023, which received widespread media coverage and public attention. We combine municipal-level information on the distribution of bank branches with individual survey data on citizens’ trust and voting intentions. Relying on a stacked difference-in-differences design, we find that exposure to banking scandals increases distrust in banks with effects that spill over into political and public institutions, shifting voting intentions toward populist anti-establishment parties, especially the Five Star Movement.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores the relationship between loneliness, trust, and populist voting across both extremes of the ideological spectrum. The contribution of this research is mainly two-fold. First, it considers different dimensions of loneliness and accounts for its predetermined component stemming from social isolation in childhood and adverse childhood experiences. Second, it disentangles the effects of loneliness and trust by incorporating actual interpersonal trust behaviour elicited from a large-scale trust game experiment conducted in 27 European member states, involving more than 25,000 individuals. The richness of the data allows to account for the impact of competitive explanatory factors such as emotions, objective social isolation, social media use and economic preferences. The main findings suggest the following: (i) social loneliness significantly impacts populist voting, particularly on the extreme right, whereas the emotional dimension of loneliness is associated with more left-leaning, but non-populist, voting preferences; (ii) higher levels of interpersonal trust are associated with lower support for right-wing populist parties; (iii) loneliness and trust operate through distinct channels: loneliness exerts a greater impact on women and older individuals, while trust plays a more significant role among men and middle-aged individuals, and (iv) the effect of social loneliness on support of populist parties is significantly attenuated in contexts with a history of recurrent economic crises, suggesting a potential experience-based learning mechanism.

ABSTRACT. How does exposure to automation affect employment outcomes early in the career? To answer this question, we provide new worker-level evidence using matched administrative and survey data for a large cohort of Italian workers aged 15–30. We exploit firm-level information on investments in different automation technologies undertaken in 2015–2017 and track quarterly employment transitions over 2018–2023, spanning the COVID-19 firing freeze and its removal. We find that exposure to automation significantly increases employment stability for young workers, with marginal effects ranging between 8 and 10 percentage points across technologies. Importantly, these gains are highly heterogeneous: they are substantially larger for tertiary-educated workers, for employees in larger firms, on permanent contracts, and in high-tech sectors. Because automation disproportionately benefits workers who are already more skilled and more institutionally protected, it widens within-cohort inequality in employment stability. In a rigid labor market, therefore, these distributional consequences operate primarily through the employment margin rather than through wage premia.

ABSTRACT. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping work and raising new questions about the political demand for labor-market intervention. We study how workers’ exposure to AI shapes support for alternative policy responses using a survey experiment on a representative sample of Italian employees. Respondents are randomly assigned to one of three narratives framing AI as a technology that (i) may substitute for human labor, (ii) complement workers’ tasks, or (iii) increase the need for reskilling. We then elicit support for five policy instruments: unemployment benefits, short-time work schemes, minimum-income support, publicly funded training, and hiring subsidies. Among workers with no direct AI experience, the treatments increase support for active adjustment policies, especially training and hiring subsidies. Among AI users, the treatments reduce support for passive insurance policies, such as unemployment benefits and short-time work schemes. These effects are not explained by changes in perceived job-loss risk, expected household financial losses, or general support for government regulation. The results suggest that direct experience with AI shapes not only workers’ demand for government intervention, but also their preferred policy mix.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines the impact of superstitious beliefs on human capital accumulation, focusing on the Italian fear of Friday the 17th. Using administrative records covering more than 1.7 million university exams from 2002 to 2023, we document a systematic performance penalty when exams are held on this culturally salient date. Students score significantly lower on Friday the 17th compared to other days, even after controlling for a rich set of fixed effects and covariates. To identify superstition as the underlying mechanism, we construct individual-level superstition indices by combining the European Values Study with an original survey administered at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. The results reveal that the negative effect is entirely driven by students with a higher predicted propensity to be superstitious, while it vanishes among less superstitious individuals. Robustness checks and placebo tests rule out alternative explanations such as exam difficulty or student selection. Our findings highlight how cultural beliefs can act as exogenous cognitive frictions, reducing educational performance and potentially widening socioeconomic inequalities.

ABSTRACT. Why are we not investing sufficiently in mental health? We conduct a pre-registered online experiment across seven European countries (N = 8,312) to test the effectiveness of alternative framings of the mental health issue in increasing investment and normative beliefs. Participants are randomly exposed to narratives emphasizing personal benefits, collective benefits, or simple prevalence data. All treatments significantly increase cooperation and donations in incentivised tasks, with effects driven more by moral conviction than expectations about others’ behaviour. All framings reduce mental health stigma, which boosts donations where stigma is high but can backfire in low-stigma settings. Treatment effects are strongest among participants with low mental well-being or stronger priors about mental health severity, and weaker where public provision is perceived adequate, suggesting a substitution effect. Our findings support the use of low-cost narratives to promote investment in mental health.

ABSTRACT. We study the effects of compulsory military service on mental health by exploiting the 2005 suspension of conscription in Italy. Using individual-level health survey data, we implement a regression discontinuity design around the birth-cohort cutoff separating the last conscripted cohort from the first fully exempted one. Men exposed to compulsory service report significantly worse psychological and mental health, are less likely to feel calm, and are more likely to smoke. These effects are robust across non-parametric, parametric, and discrete specifications. We also provide evidence of relative comparison effects across adjacent cohorts, which may amplify -but do not fully account for- the observed discontinuities. We further document spillover effects within households: cohabiting relatives of exposed men exhibit lower psychological wellbeing and a higher propensity to smoke, consistent with stress transmission mechanisms. Finally, using data on causes of death (2000–2021), a difference-in-differences design shows that suicide rates among young men aged 20–24 declined disproportionately in low-education provinces. Since university students could defer service, the reform equalized exposure between students and non-students. No effects emerge for armed forces personnel, women, or other age groups. Overall, even short-term compulsory service in peacetime generated persistent adverse effects on mental health and family wellbeing.

ABSTRACT. Traditional poverty measurement in the European Union (EU) utilises household income as the unit of analysis. This approach can mask gender inequalities by assuming equal intra-household resource sharing and overlooking individuals—often women—who have little or no personal income. We take a feminist perspective in the current article, focusing on gendered poverty measurement, assessing gendered poverty and financial dependence in EU countries. We synthesize theoretical arguments around individual poverty measurements and construct new indicators for capturing intra-household disparities. The following brief description of our data and identification strategy (Difference-in-Differences [DiD], event-study, and triple-difference designs) is based on microdata from EU countries. The method also captures gender-focused poverty outcomes during two major economic crises (the post-2008 Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic). Then we present empirical results, followed by robustness checks and coverage of policy implications for gender-sensitive social protection. The findings of our analysis highlight the importance of moving toward individual‑level poverty indicators that can guide the design of better and more gender‑sensitive social policies.

ABSTRACT. The EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is a cornerstone of European climate policy, relying on market incentives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, the VAT treatment of emission allowances has created opportunities for missing-trader fraud, particularly in cross-border transactions. This project investigates VAT fraud within the ETS and its implications for market functioning and policy design. First, we aim at identifying fraudulent trading patterns and at assessing how fraud distorts prices, trading volumes, and the distribution of gains and losses between compliant and non-compliant traders. Second, we evaluate the effectiveness of the reverse-charge mechanism introduced to curb missing-trader fraud, exploiting its staggered and uncoordinated adoption across EU member states. Using transaction-level data from the EU Transaction Log covering 2005–2018, enriched with price, institutional, and firm-level information, we implement a staggered difference-in-differences design.

ABSTRACT. We examine how policymakers can downscale the elasticity of taxable income (ETI) via stricter tax enforcement and third-party monitoring. We build on a stylized model in which bunching at kinks in tax schedule declines with the share of third-party-monitored income. Using tax-return data on the Czech self-employed, we show that the ETI falls by around 30% in sectors that become subject to real-time monitoring of business-to-customer sales via electronic sales registers (e-Registers). Our evidence provides causal evidence that the ETI is a policy variable scalable via tax system characteristics.

ABSTRACT. We analyze the Concordato Preventivo Biennale (CPB), a two-year advance tax agreement between taxpayers and the tax authority on fixed income tax liabilities, introduced in Italy in 2024 with the aim of promoting collaborative tax compliance among small businesses and self-employed workers. Within a tax evasion model, we first characterize which types of taxpayers are more likely to take up the CPB on the basis of their risk attitudes and exposure to income uncertainty. We then show how the CPB can be designed to increase both tax collection and taxpayer welfare, and compare offer schemes based on individual past income declarations with those based on past declarations of the reference group.

ABSTRACT. Population ageing has been widely studied for its implications for healthcare demand. Yet much less attention has been paid to the parallel ageing of the medical workforce. In response to physician shortages, a recent policy measure, operational from 2024, allows Italian GPs to remain in service until age 73. Since a direct impact evaluation of this reform requires at least two post-implementation years of data, this study informs the debate by examining whether GP performance changes as physicians approach the traditional retirement age. Drawing on human capital theory, retirement proximity may affect GP performance via two competing mechanisms: accumulated experience may enhance performance, while human capital depreciation, reflecting reduced effort or shifting focus, may offset these gains. We test the net effect of these mechanisms on selected utilization-based indicators of GP performance. Using administrative data from a large Italian Local Health Authority, we analyze type II diabetes patients continuously enrolled with GPs from 2018 to 2023. Exploiting variation in retirement proximity across GPs, we apply a staggered difference-in-differences approach to examine treatment effect dynamics. We find no evidence of systematic deterioration in potentially inappropriate use, hospitalizations, emergency department access, or diabetes-related avoidable hospitalizations. However, patients of GPs closer to retirement are less likely to receive at least two HbA1c tests per year, while the one-test indicator is unaffected. These findings suggest that extending GPs’ working life may alleviate workforce shortages without adverse effects on utilization-based performance indicators, although support for adherence to evolving chronic care monitoring standards may be needed.

ABSTRACT. This paper studies the relationship between Emergency Department (ED) use and Out-of-hours primary care (Guardia Medica) in Italy. The analysis uses individuallevel microdata from ISTAT’s Multipurpose Survey on Households: Aspects of Daily Life (Aspetti della vita quotidiana) for the homogeneous 2014–2023 coding period. The empirical question is whether ED use and out-of-hours primary care appear to operate as substitutes or whether they are jointly used by overlapping high-need populations. The design is descriptive and associational. We estimate individual-level probit models for ED use, report average marginal effects, and condition on demographic, socioeconomic, health-status, morbidity, hospitalisation, and region-year factors. The evidence provides little support for a simple substitution mechanism. In the analytical complete-case sample of 357,025 individuals, ED use is 5.20 percent among individuals not using OOH primary care and 33.06 percent among OOH primary care users. In the preferred specification with region-year fixed effects, OOH primary care use is associated with a 20.71 percentage-point higher probability of ED use. The association remains large across alternative specifications, morbidity definitions, preCOVID estimates, need-based subsamples, a linear probability model, and macro-area samples. Dual users display worse observable health profiles, including poorer selfrated health, higher morbidity, and more recent hospitalisation. These patterns are more consistent with high-need sorting, latent complementarity, and co-utilisation by fragile populations than with direct substitution. The findings suggest that territorial care reforms such as DM 77/2022 are coherent with the observed concentration of service use among high-need individuals, but their effectiveness is likely to depend on coordination, triage, and continuity of care rather than on the mere expansion of alternative access points.

ABSTRACT. We study preventive effort and hospital referral decisions by primary care physicians treating chronically ill patients. We analyze effects of feefor- service and pay-for-performance under varying constraints on hospital capacity, where physicians differ in altruism, risk aversion, and probability weighting. Theoretical predictions are tested in laboratory experiments with medical students and artefactual field experiments with practicing physicians. In line with theory, both service and performance fees, as well as a lack of hospital capacity, increase prevention effort. However, contrary to theory, risk aversion and probability weighting play only a small role.

ABSTRACT. Municipal bankruptcy is a highly visible fiscal event: although triggered by financial distress, its timing and declaration are discretionary and politically consequential. This paper studies whether such bankruptcies generate fiscal spillovers to nearby governments. Using Italian municipalities between 2000 and 2015, I combine a border-based exposure design with staggered difference-in-differences and event-study methods to compare municipalities bordering a bankrupt neighbor with more distant municipalities. Baseline estimates indicate that exposure to a neighboring bankruptcy is followed by fiscal tightening among nearby municipalities. Direct neighbors increase debt repayment by roughly 20 percent relative to pre-exposure levels and improve net fiscal surplus within one to two years. Effects attenuate with geographic distance and are not accompanied by increases in off-balance-sheet liabilities. Adjustment occurs through expenditure restraint and strengthened own-source revenues. Heterogeneity patterns suggest stronger debt-repayment responses among municipalities with higher pre-existing debt and interest burdens, consistent with a disciplinary-signal mechanism: nearby bankruptcy raises perceived enforcement risk and induces precautionary consolidation among fiscally vulnerable governments. The findings suggest that salient fiscal failures can transmit discipline across jurisdictions even in the absence of formal fiscal linkages.

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates the impact of population ageing – specifically the share of retired individuals – on the fiscal behaviour of local governments in Italy. In particular, we examine how the demographic composition of the electorate shifts municipal priorities across revenues and expenditures. The endogeneity between demographic trends and local policies is addressed using an Instrumental Variables (IV) approach based on exogenous variations in pension eligibility introduced by national reforms. Exploiting a comprehensive dataset that merges administrative, budgetary, and socio-economic information on Italian municipalities for the years 2018 and 2019, we find that a higher proportion of retirees leads to an increase in the effective property tax rate (IMU) and a significant reduction in the share of the budget allocated to education.

ABSTRACT. Does providing politicians with low-cost access to information about their peers change their fiscal behavior? This paper investigates this question by exploiting a data disclosure program introduced by the Italian government that allowed mayors to access detailed expenditure data of other municipalities through a restricted website, before the information was shared with voters. By tracking digital activity on the platform, we construct a directed network of peer monitoring. We find that mayors in the digital network are younger, more educated, and govern larger municipalities. Using a novel identification strategy that exploits network intransitivity to address the reflection problem, we show that digital transparency generates strategic interaction in property tax setting consistent with yardstick competition—but only among mayors who are not term-limited. No such interaction is found among municipalities outside the network, nor between geographically adjacent municipalities within it, ruling out tax competition as the driving mechanism. These findings suggest that digital platforms can facilitate a distinct, reputation-based form of yardstick competition.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines whether receiving financial assistance from the European Union (EU) after natural disasters during early adulthood shapes individuals’ subsequent confidence in the EU. We focus on the European Solidarity Fund (EUSF) and combine individual-level survey data with information on disasters and EUSF interventions over the 2002–2018 period. Exploiting the conditional exogeneity of natural disasters and geocoded data on their subnational scope, we show that EUSF aid increases citizens’ confidence in the EU. The effect is stronger in regions with lower-quality local governance and among more risk-averse individuals. Finally, we show that the EUSF mitigates the economic downturns that typically follow disasters, providing evidence of both political and economic returns to EU-level solidarity.

ABSTRACT. Hedonic models suggest that real estate markets price natural disaster risk, particularly in the aftermath of catastrophic events. But can public salience alone—absent any actual disaster and with an underlying hazard already known and pre-existing—shift risk perception and tolerance enough to affect economic behavior and market outcomes? We answer this question by drawing on a natural experiment provided by the Phlegraean Fields, a large volcanic caldera near Naples, Italy. The area is home to over one million residents and is characterized by bradyseism, a distinctive geological phenomenon involving cyclic ground uplift often accompanied by seismic activity perceptible by the population. Combining granular sub-municipal data with an event-study design, we show that the bradyseismic crisis that began in 2023 significantly affected local real estate markets, despite minimal physical damage and no abrupt change in the long-known risks of living in the area. We find substantial heterogeneity both between and within affected zones, and the results suggest that the crisis is exacerbating pre-existing housing inequality in the most vulnerable areas.

ABSTRACT. We study whether the provision of specific functions through inter-municipal cooperation (IMC), rather than by single municipalities, affects citizens' perceptions of local government management and service delivery. We use the floods that affected Emilia-Romagna in May 2023 as a natural experiment to examine whether citizens living in municipalities that cooperated through inter-municipal arrangements evaluated local flood management differently from those living in municipalities providing services independently. We combine survey data collected after the disaster with administrative information on municipal service cooperation. Our results show that, in flood-affected municipalities, the probability that citizens report extreme dissatisfaction with prevention measures increases by 24.6 percentage points in non-IMC municipalities compared to municipalities not affected by floods. This probability falls to 13.4 percentage points in municipalities participating in IMC arrangements, indicating that IMC attenuates the negative effect of the disaster on citizens' evaluations by 11.2 percentage points. A channel decomposition reveals this protective effect is entirely driven by joint territorial management — the cooperative function covering land-use planning and environmental services — while IMC in all other services shows no effect. Our findings suggest that cooperation in functions directly related to disaster prevention and territorial governance can shield local governments from the reputational costs of adverse shocks.

ABSTRACT. Where does women’s political entry first take root? During the Italian Resistance against Nazi-Fascist occupation (1943–45), tens of thousands of women took on political and military roles within clandestine networks, at a time when Italian women could neither vote nor stand for office. Using a novel micro-level dataset on the members of the Resistance (≈ 240 000), I trace the long-run political legacy of women’s wartime agency. Across municipalities, higher female participation in the Resistance translated into more women running for national office and stronger electoral support for women’s rights. Identification relies on extensive prewar controls and an instrumental variable strategy based on terrain ruggedness, which increased reliance on local women to sustain Resistance cells. The legacy extended beyond the women who fought, through mass women’s associations and public commemoration, persisting to this day. The findings shed new light on how brief, salient shocks to female political agency can create local political capital and durably alter the trajectory of women’s political inclusion.

ABSTRACT. Does electing a female political leader fuel a far-right backlash? Using a regression discontinuity design on close mixed-gender mayoral races in Italian municipalities, we find that electing a female mayor raises the vote share of Lega - Italy's main populist radical right party - by 2.0 percentage points at the next general election, nearly doubling the average change. To investigate the mechanisms, we construct novel municipal-level indices of masculinity norms and gender norms, and show that the reaction is concentrated where masculinity norms are stronger and is further amplified by local economic insecurity, while exhibiting no clear gradient along progressive gender norms. This pattern is consistent with a status-threat mechanism. The results provide causal evidence that advances in women's political leadership generate a far-right electoral backlash, and identify masculinity - rather than gender norms per se - as the cultural margin along which it operates.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines whether the election of female mayors influences women’s voter turnout in Italian municipalities between 1993 and 2023. Using a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) that exploits close electoral races between male and female candidates, we estimate the causal effect of female political leadership on women’s political participation. The results indicate no significant effect when considering the full sample. However, in municipalities with fewer than 20,000 inhabitants and in more recent elections, we find that electing a female mayor increases women’s turnout by approximately 3 percentage points. Robustness checks, including alternative bandwidth selections and placebo tests, confirm the validity of our findings. Additionally, we evidence stronger effects in municipalities with higher social capital, greater female labour force participation, and in northern Italy. These findings contribute to the literature on gender and political engagement, highlighting the role of local political representation in shaping electoral behaviour and the conditions under which role model effects are more pronounced.

ABSTRACT. Existing research finds contrasting results on the associations between inequality and political participation. The present work aims to address this long-standing puzzle examining the relationship between income inequality and electoral turnout in Italian municipalities. Building on the insight that the political consequences of inequality are spatially contingent, the article develops a place-based explanation of inequality salience. The analysis argues that inequality becomes more politically relevant in poorer municipalities and in territorially marginal areas identified through the official Italian classification of “Inner Areas”, which captures municipalities geographically distant from essential services. The analysis further examines whether these mechanisms reinforce each other in low-income Inner Areas. The empirical analysis employs a new municipal-level panel dataset covering all Italian municipalities over six national parliamentary elections between 2001 and 2022. The results show a robust and heterogeneous association between income and electoral participation. While municipalities with relatively higher average income exhibit higher turnout, the association between income inequality and voter turnout becomes more complex. Income inequality is positively associated with turnout in low-income municipalities and in territorially marginal municipalities located in Inner Areas. The positive association becomes stronger where both economic disadvantage and territorial marginality overlap, namely in low-income municipalities located in Inner Areas. In contrast, the association is negative in more economically advantaged and territorially integrated municipalities. These findings suggest that the relationship between income inequality and political participation is not geographically uniform. Instead, the political relevance of inequality depends on local contexts.

JEL classification:D31, R12, C23

ABSTRACT. Political abstention is not a random phenomenon, but rather a territorially stratified process of socio-economic marginalization. This study examines whether Italy’s Reddito di Cittadinanza (RdC), a national income support program activated in the period 2019-2023, has counteracted abstentionism. The channel we explore is the activation of political participation in electoral turnouts through economic inclusion. Using a difference-in-differences design with matching on pre-treatment trends, we exploit regional disparities across Northern, Central, and Southern municipalities to assess the program’s impact on political inclusion. Results show striking regional variation: in Southern Italy, where RdC coverage is high and social exclusion pervasive, greater exposure reduces abstention, driven by both male and female electors. In the North-Center, where coverage is lower and uneven, higher exposure does not reduce abstention, but rather increases it, driven by discontent dynamics and mediated by local economic decline. Analyses by territorial geoclass (SNAI classification) confirm that policy access can enhance political inclusion, though deep deprivation may constrain its reach. Consistent with \emph{Power Theory}, political participation remains linked to material security and social inclusion. At the same time, \emph{Conflict Theory} becomes particularly relevant in areas characterized by intensified discontent.

ABSTRACT. Citizens participate in economic life not only as consumers and market participants but also as contributors to and beneficiaries of collective arrangements. Through taxation, public expenditure, and democratic representation, they are involved in decisions concerning the production, financing, and allocation of public resources. Understanding these processes requires a set of competences that differ from those traditionally associated with personal financial management. Just as financial literacy has become a component of individual economic capability, this paper argues that public financial competence may represent an equally important prerequisite for informed participation in collective decisions. Within this theoretical framework, the paper develops a conceptual framework and a corresponding indicator of economic competence in the public finance domain. Next, it shows the levels of public financial competence in the population and examines how it relates to civic attitudes and behaviours, including political participation, trust in institutions, and tax morale. In this preliminary draft, empirical evidence is limited to an explorative analysis using evidence from two pilot surveys conducted in Italy. Empirically, knowledge of public finance concepts appears less widespread than competences associated with personal financial management. Theoretically, knowledge of public finance and understanding of fiscal mechanisms may represent a core but overlooked element of citizenship in contemporary democracies.

ABSTRACT. In this study, we examine the role of high school performance in shap- ing university migration patterns of students from the South of Italy. Using micro-level longitudinal data on the school-university transition, we first de- velop an adjusted high school performance indicator based on standardized test scores, and then, employing multinomial logistic regression models, we investigate the relationship between high school performance and student mobility choices. Students attending high-performing schools are substan- tially more likely to migrate for tertiary education compared with students from low-performing schools. The effects of school performance are particu- larly relevant for disadvantaged groups in short-distance university mobility. Students from technical and vocational schools, students with lower final grades, and students from families with lower socio-economic and cultural status experience greater mobility opportunities when they attend schools with stronger performance levels. However, for South-to-North mobility, family economic resources remain a crucial determinant, suggesting that structural inequalities continue to constrain access to prestigious universi- ties.

ABSTRACT. Working while enrolled is often interpreted as a response to financial need, especially in highereducation systems where university attendance relies heavily on family support and public student aid is limited. This paper asks whether this interpretation fits the Italian case. Using linked IT-SILC–INPS data for tertiary students aged 18–29 between 2004 and 2017, we identify working-student status from administrative contribution records and estimate Probit models for registered employment during enrolment. The results suggest that student employment in Italy cannot be reduced to a simple financial-need story. Registered work is similarly frequent across much of the household-income distribution and declines mainly among students from the most advantaged families. The evidence also points to the role of public support, parental background and household conditions in shaping working-student status. The analysis reveals heterogeneity by gender and area of residence.

ABSTRACT. This paper evaluates the impact of the 2010 Italian university reform on academic nepotism using surname persistence among newly hired academics. We first analyze surname persistences within universities to quantify the reform’s direct effect on family hiring. We then extend the analysis to the national level and identify nepotism by comparing the differential impacts within and across disciplinary fields.

ABSTRACT. Cultural events are increasingly used to enhance city visibility and stimulate local development, yet systematic evidence on their political economy remains limited. The Italian Capital of Culture program—established in 2014 and annually awarding a highly visible title to one municipality—offers a salient setting to examine how political incentives shape competitive cultural program allocations. Although the procedure is formally merit-based, it combines voluntary participation, technical screening, and discretionary executive decision-making, creating several margins at which politics may intervene. Building on political budget cycle theory (PBC), we conceptualize the allocation of this this title-awarding (and the related public transfer) as a sequential process, and test whether political alignment between local and central governments affects participation, advancement, and final designation. Using propensity score matching to construct a counterfactual group of comparable non-applicant municipalities and estimating a sequence of logit models, we disentangle strategic entry decisions from discretionary allocation. The results reveal a marked asymmetry: alignment does not influence the probability of applying or being shortlisted, but it strongly and significantly increases the likelihood of winning. These findings indicate that competitive procedures may preserve the appearance of meritocracy while allowing politically motivated allocation at the final stage. The study contributes to research on political business cycles, multi-level governance, and cultural policy by showing that symbolic cultural events can function as strategic electoral tools.

ABSTRACT. Does the electoral calendar shape construction activity in Italian municipalities? We study this using the ISPRA Carta Nazionale del Consumo di Suolo — the first satellite-derived land-cover dataset applied to a political business cycle study — covering 7,761 municipalities over 2015–2024. Unlike fiscal and administrative outcomes, ISPRA measurements cannot be retroactively altered by the governments under study. To handle the recurring nature of electoral treatment, we implement a Stacked DiD design with cohort-specific clean control groups and a prior-cycle contamination guard. We find a post-election mandate cycle in construction sites: mayors suppress construction in the year before the election and accelerate it in the two years that follow, a swing of approximately 12 percentage points. The pattern reverses among lame-duck mayors, consistent with a political-debt mechanism, and is concentrated in municipalities with fewer than 3,000 inhabitants and in northern Italy.

ABSTRACT. We study whether realized climate risk affects electoral participation. Using Italian municipality-level returns from national and European Parliament elections (2001–2023) and detailed georeferenced records of extreme weather events, we measure local exposure relative to predetermined election dates. Exploiting quasi-random variation in the timing and severity of shocks within a staggered difference-in-differences design, we find that turnout falls by 3 percentage points following extreme precipitation shortly before an election. We characterize the salience of these shocks through three distinct dimensions: recency, as the effect decays with temporal distance; signal strength, with more severe shocks generating persistent responses; and learning, as prior exposure attenuates the impact of new events. Importantly, the effect persists in the absence of physical damages and when controlling for election-day weather, identifying a behavioral rather than mechanical friction in the decision to vote. These results identify realized climate risk as a new important determinant of turnout, highlighting a distinct channel through which climatic volatility skews democratic representation and accountability.

ABSTRACT. The paper examines the evolution of Italian corporate tax systems over 2024–2025, a period characterised by significant changes to the tax base, including the abolition of the Allowance for Corporate Equity (ACE), the introduction of an additional deduction for labour costs related to new permanent hires, and the subsequent implementation of a reduced IRES rate for companies reinvesting profits in eligible fixed assets (the so-called ‘IRES premiale’). We analyse the heterogeneous effects of these reforms on firms' tax liabilities and effective tax rates using the ISTAT-MATIS microsimulation model. The model enables precise estimation of the effects of tax changes resulting from both the elimination of a structural component of the Italian corporate tax, such as the ACE, which had been in place since 2011, and the implementation of selective tax expenditures. One in four companies would be disadvantaged by the abolition of the ACE, while the beneficiaries of the increased deduction for new hires would represent only 5.6%, and the taxpayers meeting the conditions to benefit from the IRES premium would account for 1.4% of the entire population of non-financial companies. These results suggest that companies are disadvantaged overall. The ‘IRES premiale’ introduces a highly complex and selective mechanism, which is unlikely to influence companies' investment and capitalisation decisions as significantly as the ACE.

ABSTRACT. This paper presents an ex-post evaluation of investment incentives for technologically advanced capital goods (Industry 4.0). It assesses the effects of increased depreciation allowances (hyper-depreciation) on the one hand, and the tax credit on the other. It thus contributes to understanding the efficacy of these measures, which is relevant both for verifying that the public resources employed have effectively achieved their intended purposes and for assessing the role of industrial policy and its ability to influence business decisions. The first part of the paper describes the features of the two types of incentives. The second part evaluates the effects of the two incentives on company behaviour using a counterfactual evaluation techniques. The analysis was conducted using the UPB MEDITA corporate tax microsimulation model, that allows simulation with and without tax incentives and its effect on the tax returns and cash flow at firm level.

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates the relationship between corporate income taxation and the adoption of Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) in the United States. Although ESOPs have historically and currently been associated with tax incentives, the extent to which taxation effectively drives their adoption remains debated in the literature. Using panel data on ESOP entries across U.S. counties over twenty years, the study employs a border county-pair design that compares contiguous counties located on opposite sides of the same state border and exposed to different corporate tax regimes. This approach exploits within-pair variation over time in corporate tax-rate differentials and discrete tax changes, while controlling for permanent differences between adjacent counties and common national shocks. The results provide limited evidence that corporate tax rates affect aggregate ESOP entry. Instead, the main pattern is compositional: corporate tax increases are associated with a relative shift away from C-Corporation ESOPs and toward S-Corporation ESOPs, while tax decreases do not generate a comparable response. These preliminary findings point to an asymmetric and compositionally heterogeneous response of firms to corporate tax policy, affecting not only the level but also the type of ESOP adoption.

ABSTRACT. The present study aims to evaluate how healthcare financing mechanisms across European countries adjust to variations in local health needs, with a specific focus on the role of decentralization. We aim to provide a quantitative estimate of the elasticity of funding with respect to health needs and to investigate the role that the rules that are used to allocate financial resources across local authorities, when relevant, play in shaping spatial health inequalities. The study utilizes two complementary quantitative approaches. The first is a panel analysis of NUTS 2 regional data (covering 2011–2021) linking health needs, proxied by crude mortality, to two proxies of public funding: per-capita public healthcare expenditure and the number of hospital beds per inhabitant. Elasticity is estimated of funding with respect to health needs is estimated for the whole sample, groups of countries sharing similar characteristics and individual countries with a sufficient number of NUTS 2 regions. The second approach is an individual-level analysis using the 2019 wave of the European Health Interview Survey. A logit model estimates the predicted probability of experiencing unmet healthcare needs conditional on health status (presence of 16 medical conditions) to identify regional disparities in service provision. Across the full sample, the responsiveness of funding to health needs is modest: a 1% increase in regional mortality is associated with only a 0.18% rise in public expenditure and a 0.31% increase in hospital beds. Notably, funding tends to be higher in richer regions, contradicting standard equity principles. Significant country-level heterogeneity exists; Belgium, France, Spain, and Sweden show relatively strong alignment between funding and needs, whereas Italy and Czechia perform poorly, with elasticities close to zero or negative. Individual-level data confirm these disparities: persons with chronic conditions face a higher probability of unmet needs, and substantial regional inequalities in access exist in approximately half of the examined countries. Overall, the results of the comparative analysis at the individual level are broadly consistent with those obtained from the analysis of aggregate data. The findings indicate that decentralization does not inherently lead to inequality; rather, the design of allocation rules is the primary driver of performance. Countries relying on pure capitation or lacking formal allocation formulas (e.g., Italy and Austria) show the weakest alignment with local needs. Conversely, systems utilizing sophisticated formulas that integrate demographic, socio-economic, and epidemiological indicators (e.g., Sweden) achieve more equitable resource distribution.

ABSTRACT. In health systems pairing universal coverage with large private markets, who absorbs the cost when the public system is overwhelmed? Using an administrative panel of over 8 million Italian taxpayers (2019–2024) linked to municipal excess mortality, we estimate within-region, within-person effects of COVID intensity on out-of-pocket (OOP) health spending. The aggregate V-shaped collapse conceals a regressive reallocation. The 2020 response ran through higher spending among existing private users—concentrated among the affluent; the poor were excluded. By 2022–2024 the gradient inverts: new lower-income users enter private care, bearing the persistent burden. The shift is behavioral, not selection, and unrelated to NHS capacity—surfacing in private dental use and amplified at retirement. The pandemic did not create inequality; it sequenced it.

ABSTRACT. Sugar-sweetened beverages are a major source of free sugars in Western diets. In response, several European countries have introduced taxes to encourage product reformulation and reduce consumption. This study assesses how these taxes affected sales in off-trade and on-trade markets, examines consumers’ potential substitution effects using Euromonitor data (2004–2019), and evaluates manufacturers’ reformulation responses through Mintel product-launch data (2010–2019). We focus on six countries that implemented such taxes, specifically Belgium, France, Hungary, Ireland, Portugal, and the United Kingdom, and additionally analyse Denmark, which introduced a similar tax earlier and repealed it in 2014, providing a reverse test case. Using a synthetic control approach, we construct counterfactual scenarios to estimate tax impacts. We find significant sales effects only under progressive tax designs, while reformulation emerged consistently, particularly where sugar thresholds and implementation timelines were clearly defined.

ABSTRACT. Decentralization reforms are typically justified on efficiency grounds, yet their distributional consequences remain poorly understood. We show that a uniform administrative decentralization reform can generate aggregate efficiency gains while simultaneously widening territorial disparities, depending on the pre-existing bureaucratic capacity of local governments. Exploiting spatial variation in the implementation of a major Italian constitutional reform of 2001 through a matched difference-in-differences design and data covering 1998–2007, we document significant average efficiency gains. However, aggregate gains mask a distributional divide: highcapacity municipalities achieve efficiency improvements through cost optimization, maintaining their pre-reform growth trajectory, while low-capacity municipalities concentrate efforts on visible short-term gains and experience an average income loss of approximately 116 per capita. We identify four mechanisms driving this divergence: enhanced fiscal accountability through greater reliance on local taxation, a strategic shift toward income taxation paired with greater leniency in tax collection among low-capacity municipalities, incumbents’ re-election incentives, and local governments’ responsiveness to citizens’ expressed preferences for decentralization. This study provides important policy implications for understanding distributional consequences of decentralization processes and inform their optimal design.

ABSTRACT. Local public spending in Italy has been influenced by the implementation process of the PNRR, which also introduced innovations in the methods of intergovernmental transfers. Italian municipalities, the focus of this study, show substantial differences in administrative capacity and the quality of institutions, which translate into varying spending capacities at the local level. In this study, an empirical analysis is developed on the effects of the performance-based approach in terms of resource allocation to municipalities for early childhood services. Using microdata from various sources and a micro-econometric empirical strategy, the results of the analysis indicate that performance-based transfers promote allocation even in areas with lower institutional capacity, provided that the allocation method is coordinated by the central government in a top-down manner. The evidence also provides guidance for the current discussion on the recalibration of European transfers for the next multi-annual framework.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines, from a primarily economic perspective, the state of implementation of the Essential Levels of Public Services (Livelli Essenziali delle Prestazioni, LEP) in Italy, providing a comprehensive assessment that traces the evolution of the regulatory framework, draws on international comparisons, and evaluates the recent momentum generated by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), differentiated regional autonomy, and the 2026 Budget Law. Starting from the constitutional framework and the preparatory work of the Committee for the Determination of the LEP (CLEP), the paper investigates the tension between the legal and financial dimensions of the LEP, highlighting the need for equalisation models that reconcile territorial needs with fiscal constraints. The analysis explores the role of standard expenditure needs, equalisation mechanisms, and concrete implementation experiences, ranging from the healthcare sector (Essential Levels of Care, LEA) to the municipal sector (service-level targets), situating the Italian path within the comparative landscape of fiscal federalism systems across major OECD countries.

ABSTRACT. This paper considers the economics of occupational health and safety (OHS) under environmental/circularity public policies regarding waste and the circular economy. With this aim, we build on, and first bring together, the literatures on the economic policy with respect to waste, the economics of occupational health and safety, and the ergonomics of waste handling. Thanks to a suitable principal-agent model, we examine the relationship between landfill taxes, firm penalties and mandatory insurance for worker accidents, employee incentives, and company investments in ergonomics to foster OHS. We find, notably, that mandating greater worker insurance coverage might not always enhance the sorting and reuse/recycling of waste.

ABSTRACT. This paper studies the joint dynamics of demographic change, environmental quality and economic development. We develop an OLG model in which fertility, human capital investment, savings, and environmental expenditure are chosen simultaneously, while survival to old age depends endogenously on environmental conditions. Environmental quality evolves as a stock affected by both mitigation efforts and consumption-related pressures, thereby linking economic activity and demographic behavior to ecological outcomes. The model highlights a key feedback mechanism: environmental quality influences longevity, which in turn shapes fertility and investment decisions, ultimately affecting future environmental conditions. By introducing a development-adjusted measure of environmental quality, we derive a reduced-form one-dimensional dynamic system that governs the evolution of the economy. We also compare the cohort-planner allocation with the decentralized equilibrium, show- ing that environmental externalities lead to underinvestment in mitigation. A combination of Pigouvian taxation and public environmental expenditure is required to implement the socially optimal allocation. Overall, the paper provides a unified framework to understand how demographic forces and environmental dynamics interact, and how policy can influence long-run development paths.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines the role of financial literacy in enabling households to claim tax deductions for energy-efficient home improvements, contributing to both individual wellbeing and the green transition. Using data from the 2016 Survey on Household Income and Wealth (SHIW), we analyze how household financial literacy affects their likelihood of benefiting from these deductions and the awareness of the associated amounts. Our results indicate that higher financial literacy significantly increases both uptake and understanding of energy-related tax incentives. These findings are robust to a range of specifications and suggest that even basic financial knowledge can support policy efforts aimed at promoting energy efficiency and indirectly tax compliance. The study highlights the importance of integrating financial education into broader strategies to foster a resilient low-carbon economy.

ABSTRACT. Local governments promise democratic responsiveness but are also vulnerable to political capture by illicit actors. While existing research documents the political and economic consequences of capture, less is known about how bureaucrats respond when political leadership is captured — whether they become instruments of corrupt rule or resist it. We examine these competing expectations in the context of Italian municipalities infiltrated by mafia organizations. Leveraging a law that allows the central government to dissolve captured municipal councils, we study how bureaucratic performance responds when political capture is abruptly removed. Using a difference-in-differences design with matched controls based on a machine-learning index of mafia-infiltration risk, we show that dissolutions substantially improve bureaucratic performance. Evidence from administrative data and investigative reports supports the interpretation that the lower performance during mafia rule was driven by bureaucrats resisting political capture. Our findings show that bureaucracies mitigate, rather than amplify, the downstream consequences of political capture.

ABSTRACT. Governments frequently attempt to weaken organized crime by targeting its most powerful leaders. Yet the violence effects of such “decapitation” strategies are highly ambiguous: in some contexts they reduce conflict, while in others they trigger violent escalation.

We develop a model of heterogeneous criminal clans that compete for territory and illegal profits, showing that the effects of repression depend on how it alters the stability of collusive equilibria. If clans fight for territorial control, targeting the strongest ones reduces both violence and illegal output, whereas targeting the weakest ones similarly reduces violence but at the cost of boosting illegal output. If instead clans are able to sustain a peaceful territory-splitting agreement, targeting the strongest clans may raise violence by triggering a succession war.

We test these predictions using municipal-level data from Southern Italy and exploit variation in the composition of harsh imprisonment induced by whistle-blowing episodes. We show that repression disproportionately affecting losing factions reduces mafia-type homicides by large and persistent margins, whereas repression targeting dominant clans has weaker and less robust effects. At the same time, anti-targeted repression increases drug-abuse deaths, a proxy for illegal output, revealing a trade-off between violence reduction and criminal production.

Our findings imply that selective decapitation of dominant criminal organizations may destabilize collusive equilibria, while repression of weaker factions can reduce violence at the cost of strengthening illegal markets. Designing effective anti-crime policies therefore requires accounting for how enforcement reshapes the internal balance of power among criminal groups.

ABSTRACT. This paper provides the first causal evidence on the long-run mortality costs of organized environmental crime. We examine whether mafia-managed illegal waste disposal generated a persistent increase in cancer mortality in Campania, Southern Italy, a region known as the Land of Fires. We assemble a municipality-year panel covering all 550 Campanian municipalities over the period 1982-2023 and construct a predetermined measure of toxic exposure based on the judicial declarations of former Camorra member Carmine Schiavone, who identified the transport routes along which hazardous industrial waste was illegally buried by organised crime. Municipalities crossed by these routes constitute the treated group in a difference-in-differences (DiD) design that includes municipality fixed effects, province-by-year fixed effects, and time-varying municipal controls. Treated municipalities experienced a post-2000 increase in cancer mortality of approximately 0.17-0.19 additional deaths per 1,000 inhabitants, corresponding to 7.5-8.5 percent of the sample mean. Event-study estimates reveal no evidence of differential pre-trends and show that the mortality gap emerges only with delay, becoming largest in the later years of the panel. This temporal profile is consistent with cumulative toxic exposure and the long latency periods of environmentally related cancers. Placebo routes that share similar infrastructure characteristics but lie outside the identified disposal geography do not reproduce this pattern. The findings indicate that organised crime generates substantial and persistent public health costs and that weak environmental governance under conditions of criminal infiltration can produce long-run territorial inequalities in mortality.

ABSTRACT. How comparable are the Gini indexes made available by cross-country databases? We assemble a unified dataset of 122,351 Gini observations from twelve major databases spanning 222 countries and 157 years, and conduct a systematic empirical analysis of the factors that may explain discordance. An analysis of matched country-year pairs documents an average gap of 4.7 Gini points globally, rising to 8-10 points in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. The use of income relative to consumption and the use of different equivalence scales are the most important sources of discrepancies explaining together as much as 18.5% of within-country-year Gini variation. Differences have increased over time at approximately 7 percent per year since 1960, a trend mostly driven by the proliferation in the number of databases. We translate these patterns into a set of empirically grounded correction factors, disaggregated by World Bank region and income group, that researchers can apply directly to harmonise Gini estimates across welfare concepts and across the gross--net income distinction. These results call for database administrators to provide much more detailed information about the Gini computation process, and for users to be much more selective in the their choices of comparable Ginis across countries and time.

ABSTRACT. This paper shows that public policies have a significant effect on inequality. The main influence is through redistribution, as public expenditures affect the distribution of disposable income through progressive direct taxation and through social benefits. We measure this effect, identify it by use of instrumental variables and find that it is quite large. We then examine how the inequality of market incomes is also affected by public policies, mainly by public education. We measure these effects as well.

ABSTRACT. We provide and investigate criteria ad related robust dominance conditions that aim at reconciling the affluence view and the poverty reduction approach to stochastic dominance condition. By focussing on the relative relevance of the income gaps to given thresholds of different income classes we derive dominance conditions that are robust to changes in the thresholds. We also make explicit the set of transfers and transformations of the income distribution that support these dominance criteria. The proposed criteria provide a rationale for reconciling poverty and affluence dominance and identify the exact conditions that should be satisfied by the comparisons that aim at combining both approaches. Keywords: Inequality, poverty, affluence, stochastic dominance, expectiles. JEL codes: D31, D63.

ABSTRACT. Institutions representing the workers’ voice have long been a contentious topic in the economic literature. Against a backdrop of inconclusive evidence and limited use of credible identification strategies, we study the impact of the 2015 policy change that introduced mandatory board-level employee representation in firms with over 1,000 employees in France. Using rich linked employer-employee data and two empirical strategies—a difference-in-differences and a difference-in-discontinuity approach—we examine how the reform affected firms and workers. Our results show a positive impact on job quality, with no evidence of adverse effects on firm performance, and heterogeneous effects between manufacturing and service sectors.

ABSTRACT. We propose a new approach to estimating job-specific public-sector wage premia, which governments can use to set wages for any position filled through a civil-service exam. Using novel data on Italian civil-service applicants, we exploit quasi-random assignment into public employment generated by exam scores and available vacancies. We compare labor-market outcomes of exam winners, waitlisted candidates, and unsuccessful applicants using regression discontinuity and event-study designs. This framework yields causal estimates of the public-sector wage premium that are not biased by self-selection into public employment. Comparing waitlisted and unsuccessful applicants, we further examine whether queuing for public-sector jobs affects employment and entrepreneurship and quantify the aggregate output losses.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores which factors measure and which ones affect work-related stress in European countries by means of observable indicators on working conditions from the 2015 wave of the European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS). Intrinsic objective characteristics together with subjective ones are included in a MIMIC model to measure work-related stress by means of a self-assessment and other potential indicators on health-related status. First results on 33 countries in Europe show a higher exposure for women to the risk of facing work-related stress. In addition, the presence of high unemployment rates in the country, job demands and job hazards, and the perception of different types of discrimination at work, increases work-related stress. This research represents one of the few studies on work-related stress including both job demands and job hazards. The findings call for the implementation of policies to contrast discrimination in the workplace and workplaces with better working conditions.

ABSTRACT. University systems in many countries expanded by establishing new institutions in areas previously lacking higher education. We study Italy’s postwar university expansion, which opened the first faculties in provinces that had never hosted one. Exploiting variation in the timing of these openings across provinces and birth cohorts in an event-study design, we find that local access increased graduation rates by 3.2 percentage points on average across treated cohorts (approximately 26 percent relative to the pre-treatment mean), with a sharp discontinuity of 1.2 percentage points at the enrollment-age threshold. The effect is significant across all urbanization levels and increasing in more urbanized provinces, consistent with complementarities between university access and local labour market conditions. Women benefited disproportionately, though gender gaps in labour market outcomes narrowed by less than those in education. Spillover effects to neighbouring provinces exist but are of secondary magnitude, with the local effect approximately twice the size of the neighbour effect. At the province level, these first openings reduced educational disparities between provinces that gained a university and those that remained unserved.

ABSTRACT. NEP 2020 focuses attention on achieving 50 percent GER by 2023. The new targets for higher education enrolment raise questions about the efficiency of public spending on higher education and the role of resource utilisation in educational performance. Underlying fiscal federal structure, coupled with fiscal constraints, this paper investigates how interstate disparities and the quality of expenditure further limit the efficient use of public resources. This study examines the efficiency of public expenditure across Indian states and uses the panel data from 2012 to 2022. The study employs SFA to estimate technical efficiency and finds that states perform at only 55.1 percent efficiency, and 87.8 percent of the differences in the actual to potential higher education output in the state are due to inefficiency. Fiscal capacity and the quality of public expenditure positively affect efficiency, whereas outstanding liabilities of the states negatively impact efficiency levels. The effects of infrastructural factors, such as hostels, also positively affect efficiency levels.

ABSTRACT. In 2010, Italy reformed the funding system of public universities so that part of government allocations would depend on performance-based criteria. The reform triggered a debate between those viewing the reform as an incentive to improve efficiency and those warning that weaker institutions in less affluent regions might be systematically penalized. The debate did not produce much empirical evidence, but it captured the conceptual ambiguity about the effects of performance-based funding in the public sector when different public service providers are in competition for users and for the benefits connected with a larger and more selected usership. This paper estimates the causal effect of funding differentials between each Italian public university and its competitors on the yearly inflows of students from each Italian region over the period 2012–2020. Identification of an average treatment effect relies on a marginal structural model that provides a pseudo-population in which the treatment assignment mechanism is conditionally independent of potential outcomes given pre-treatment observables. The outcome is estimated through a gravity model of movement flows between each region and each university. Results indicate that positive funding differentials significantly increase universities’ attractiveness: Receiving €200 more per student than the average competitor within a given regional pseudo-market is associated with a 26% higher expected enrolment from that region. Effects of past treatments persist for at least three years and are asymmetric across types of mobility—strong for interregional movements, negligible for intraregional ones. Results do not support an immediate risk of “educational deserts” but point to the emergence of a dual system which is not an explicit policy target.

ABSTRACT. An influential literature suggests that the rise of taxation should come with a ‘governance dividend’: the quality of government should improve, because the taxpaying citizenry will subject the ruler to increased scrutiny. While this fits the history of nowadays advanced economies, it is less clear whether a governance dividend can materialize in less developed economies and, above all, which taxes are more likely to produce it. This paper contributes to address this lacuna by investigating whether factor income taxation may affect governance quality in low- and middle-income countries, using panel data for 102 countries from 1965 to 2018, new measures of effective tax rates on capital and labour, and four key governance dimensions: electoral democracy, vertical accountability, egalitarian democracy, and rule of law. Our baseline estimates suggest a generalized positive association between capital income taxation and governance. By contrast, the association between labour income taxation and governance appears concentrated on egalitarian democracy. To address endogeneity, we implement an instrumental variables strategy based on shift-share instruments. Instrumental variable (IV) estimates suggest that capital taxation has a positive causal effect on the rule of law, with no clear effect on other dimensions of governance. Instead, labour income taxation exerts a positive effect on egalitarian democracy. These findings are consistent with the view that the nature of the fiscal contract may be different for capital and labour owners, and they suggest that designing tax systems may also lead countries to different paths of political and institutional development, depending on which factor of production one chooses to tax.

ABSTRACT. This paper provides new comparative evidence on labour market inequalities associated with sexual orientation across European countries. We compare the employment, working conditions and wage outcomes of individuals in same-sex cohabiting couples with those in different-sex couples. We offer both a descriptive analysis and a decomposition of the wage gaps by using cross-sectional EU-SILC data for the periods 2013-2016 and 2021-2024. We document three main findings. First, raw employment differences are largely explained by compositional factors, with conditional gaps relatively smaller in 2021-2024. Second, substantial gender asymmetries emerge: men in same-sex couples face an employment penalty of approximately 10–15% and are significantly more likely to work part-time, whereas women display a positive employment differential and a stronger attachment to full-time work. These offsetting patterns explain the near-zero aggregate effect. Third, wage decompositions reveal a persistent earnings penalty for men in same-sex couples, increasing from about 19% to 26% across periods, driven primarily by differences in returns rather than observable characteristics; no robust penalty is found for women. Cross-country evidence shows that both employment and wage gaps are markedly larger in less inclusive institutional environments, highlighting the role of legal protections and social norms in shaping labour market outcomes.

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates the dynamic interactions across three poverty dimensions (i.e., income poverty, material deprivation, and subjective poverty) using 2016-2019 EU-SILC longitudinal data for seven European countries. By estimating a dynamic trivariate probit model, the study finds significant true state dependence within each dimension, with income poverty being the most persistent. Crucially, our research identifies cross-state dependence, demonstrating that experiencing poverty in one dimension increases the likelihood of future poverty in others. This reinforcement effect varies across welfare regimes, being stronger in Mediterranean and Eastern European countries. The findings emphasize that temporary hardship can evolve into chronic, multidimensional disadvantage.

ABSTRACT. We investigate whether procurement simplification reforms are associated with a stronger concentration of public contracts just below direct-award thresholds. Using Italian public procurement award-level data, we compare contracts across four legal regimes: the 2006 Public Procurement Code, the 2016 Code, the Sblocca Cantieri phase, and the Simplification regime. Our empirical strategy is to combine observed bunching around contract-specific legal thresholds with a model-based diagnostic, the Counterfactual Threshold Crossing Probability. Our main finding is that the Simplification regime is associated with a substantially larger mass of contracts close to the applicable direct-award threshold from below. The model-based evidence shows that this pattern operates mainly through the extensive margin. Mean crossing score among candidate contracts is not highest under the Simplification Decree. The latter rather generates a much larger pool of candidates, so that aggregate expected crossing mass is markedly larger than under previous regimes. Territorial maps show that this increase translates into broader absolute net excess bunching and larger expected crossing mass across provinces. We interpret these patterns as red flags: observable procurement configurations consistent with threshold-responsive strategic behavior and relevant for monitoring.

ABSTRACT. We study how debarment lists affect incentives for non-contractible quality provision in repeated procurement, and whether such lists should be kept separate across buyers or shared through cross-debarment. In our model, two buyers repeatedly interact with a common long-lived firm and local short-lived rivals. After winning an auction, the contractor chooses unverifiable quality and is debarred if assessed as under-performing. Crucially, performance assessment is noisy, so that even a cooperating contractor may be mistakenly classified as non-cooperative.

We show that imperfect monitoring has sharply different implications under independent and shared debarment lists. Under independent lists, mistakes have a local effect: they raise the minimum discount factor needed to sustain cooperation in the noisier buyer's market, but do not spill over to the other buyer. Under a shared list, by contrast, mistakes propagate across markets, making full cooperation more fragile. Moreover, once the firm is allowed not to participate in every market on the equilibrium path, shared debarment may induce selective withdrawal: the firm may continue to serve the more accurately monitored buyer while staying out of the noisier buyer's market altogether. This effect does not arise under independent lists when the noisier market remains profitable.

ABSTRACT. We study the effects of municipal balanced-budget rules on public procurement and wages in Italy. In 2012 the central government tightened the Domestic Stability Pact (DSP), increasing the stringency of budget constraints for municipalities with at least 5,000 residents while leaving smaller municipalities exempt from this additional wave of austerity. Exploiting this reform in a difference-in-discontinuities design around the 5,000-resident threshold, and combining municipal balance-sheet data with administrative information on tenders and subcontracting firms, we show that treated municipalities react by scaling down public works procurement: they rely less on tenders, auction smaller contract amounts, and lengthen completion times relative to exempt municipalities. Using social security records, we find no detectable effect of the reform on total employment or average wages at the municipal level. However, when we link tenders to winning firms and their subcontractors, we document a significant decline in wages paid to employees of subcontracting firms operating in treated municipalities. These results suggest that stricter balanced-budget rules can shift the burden of local austerity along the procurement chain, leaving aggregate local labor-market outcomes almost unaffected while compressing wages in the lower tiers of suppliers

ABSTRACT. International comparisons among different countries’ fiscal policies have been widely under the attention of public economics research and public debate. The contribution of (Atkinson et al., 1988), opened a new way of reasoning on international fiscal comparisons presenting an initial exercise to assess the impact of the French income tax rules on the British income distribution. In line with this contribution, Baldini (2021) proposed an intra-temporal comparison of the distributive effect of the Italian Personal Income Tax (PIT) rules at the time of its constitution in 1974, on the income distribution observed in 2001 and 2017. Although several studies focus on a specific “policy swap” (see Brunori et al. (2020); Callan and Sutherland (1997); Salanauskait˙e and Verbist (2013); Urban and Pezer (2020), as examples with EU countries), a comprehensive analysis of the fiscal, incentive and distributive effects of the tax-benefit system of country X on the population of country Y (i.e. the so-called “system swap”) has not been explored due to data and modelling complexity. With this paper, we aim to investigate the potential fiscal, incentive and redistributive effects of the French tax-benefit system when applied to the Italian population, in order to assess which tax-benefit provisions could be reformed—and in which direction—if Italian policymakers seek to enhance the equity and efficiency of the system.

ABSTRACT. This paper studies whether the indexation of personal income tax parameters is an effective tool to mitigate fiscal drag and compares its effects with discretionary fiscal reforms adopted in response to inflationary shocks. Using a panel of OECD countries over the period 2000-2024, we estimate the impact of inflation on the Average Income Tax Rate (AITR) on labor. We find that indexation systematically weakens the pass-through from inflation into average tax rates. Considering the cumulative increase in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) between 2000 and 2024 across the OECD countries in our sample an increase in CPI is associated, on average, with a 2.72 percentage point increase in the AITR in non-indexing regimes, corresponding to 13,5% of average AITR in 2000. On the contrary in indexing regimes, we find a 1.4 percentage decrease in the AITR, corresponding to 7% of average AITR in 2000. Nonetheless, this result becomes considerably weaker in the 2019–2024 period, characterized by unusually high inflation: during this period several countries adopted discretionary fiscal reforms. The differential effect of indexation in determining the impact of inflation on the AITR, declines sharply in the post-2019 period. Our findings suggest that automatic indexation is a systematic and effective mechanism for limiting inflation-induced increases in labor income taxation both during periods of moderate inflation and during high-inflation episodes. However, discretionary fiscal reforms showed also to be effective, almost as automatic indexation, in dampening the effect on the AITR in the case of the exceptional inflationary shock of the 2022-2023.

ABSTRACT. We study the role of the personal income tax (PIT) in Italy in shaping earnings dynamics and redistribution in the period 1990-2026 in a context in which earned income is increasingly unequal and polarised and several changes to the PIT have reduced the tax burden on the poorest workers. The analysis relies on the use of a large longitudinal sample of private-sector employees (Longitudinal Sample Inps, LoSaI) containing administrative data on working careers. We present a thorough description of earnings trends and provide evidence on the extent to which PIT changes affected earnings trends from gross to net values for workers in non managerial positions. We formalise the effect of PIT changes on the variation in income redistribution and its determinants over time by isolating the effect of policy changes from all other effects that may determine redistribution in a dynamic setting. We further decompose the policy effect to measure to what extent PIT changes provided income support to low- and middle-income employees.

ABSTRACT. Organized cancer screening programs (OSPs) are widespread in Europe, but their equity effects remain poorly understood. Using new regional data on screening availability and eligibility rules linked to individual survey data (EHIS 2018–2020), we estimate the causal impact of organized invitations on socioeconomic inequalities in screening uptake. Exploiting quasi-exogenous variation in age-eligibility thresholds across European regions, combined with Recentered Influence Function (RIF) regressions of concentration indices, we show that while OSPs raise overall participation, they tend to widen income- and education-based gaps for breast and colorectal cancer screening. An important exception emerges for cervical cancer: organized programs reduce income-related inequality in Pap test uptake, by offsetting a highly pro-rich baseline of opportunistic screening. These results suggest that universal program design is insufficient to guarantee equitable outcomes and that distributional effects depend critically on the institutional context and baseline patterns of preventive care use.

ABSTRACT. Cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains the leading cause of death worldwide. Early detection of CVD risk factors through preventive screening programs can substantially reduce adverse outcomes, yet participation rates remain suboptimal. In this paper, we examine whether perceived social closeness between the sender and the recipient of an invitation to a free cardiovascular health check affects health beliefs and willingness to engage in preventive health behaviors. Using a survey experiment on a representative sample of approximately 2,588 individuals aged 40–74 in England—the target population for the NHS Health Check program—we randomly assign participants to receive an invitation message from a peer who either shares or does not share their social norms. We study whether social closeness between the messenger and the recipient shapes perceived susceptibility, perceived severity, and perceived benefits, as predicted by the Health Belief Model. The manipulation successfully alters perceptions of social closeness, and the estimated effects are consistent with the hypothesis that socially closer peer messages are more effective in promoting preventive health behaviors.

ABSTRACT. This study examines whether parental adherence to obligatory COVID-19 vaccination predicts children's uptake of mandatory paediatric vaccinations (at least 1 dose of Measles plus 3 doses of Tetanus) and recommended adolescent vaccinations (at least one dose of anti-Papilloma virus, HPV) in the largest Local Health Authority in central Italy (1.3M residents). Using multisource administrative data from 53,373 individuals (27,500 minors) residents and alive at January 1, 2021, we assessed adherence on pre (2019) vs post (2024) pandemic period at 2yrs of age for children and at 15yrs for adolescents. Multivariable logistic models adjusted for family size and citizenship were used to estimate the impact of parental behaviour on childrens’ uptake. In 2024 vaccination coverage decreased from 91% to 86% for paediatric vaccinations compared to 2019, while increased from 45% to 67% for adolescents’ vaccinations. Results from multivariable models show that childrens’ coverage for mandatory vaccinations is significantly affected by the parents’ behaviour regarding anti COVID-19 vaccination, with similar effects pre and post pandemic (OR=3.31 p-value<0.01 and OR=3.17 p-value<0.01, respectively), and for pre pandemic HPV uptake (OR=2.10 p-value<0.01 and OR=3.08 p-value<0.01, respectively for males and females). Stronger effects are observed for the post-pandemic period HPV coverage, more accentuated in females (OR=5.81 p-value<0.01) with respect to males (OR=4.83 p-value<0.01). These findings could contribute to the local and national strategies aimed at sustaining high coverage for both mandatory and recommended vaccines, and to the overall resilience of immunization programmes in the post-pandemic era.

ABSTRACT. This paper studies the welfare comparison between full centralisation and asymmetric decentralisation in a two-region economy with local public goods. One region provides its public good autonomously, while the central government retains responsibility for provision in the other. Public-good spillovers are directional: the externality generated by one region need not coincide with the externality generated in the opposite direction. Preferences are left in general implicit form, subject to standard concavity and boundary conditions and to a sufficient curvature restriction on the valuation of public provision. Using the implicit function theorem and the envelope theorem, we show that the welfare gap between asymmetric decentralisation and full centralisation is strictly increasing in the autonomous region's efficiency advantage, implying a unique critical threshold at which the two regimes are welfare-equivalent. The comparative statics of this threshold reveal a common structural principle: when the social value of the spillover produced by a region rises, the regime that provides more of that region's public good gains more. The results isolate a free-riding wedge generated by asymmetric autonomy and clarify when decentralised flexibility can offset the externality-internalisation advantage of centralisation.

ABSTRACT. Reducing structural underprovision and disparities in public services across jurisdictions are key challenges in decentralized countries. This paper investigates the differential effects of earmarked and unconditional grants in promoting local governments’ expenditure in social services. We analyse the impact of a recent policy of the Italian government aimed at achieving an adequate level of social expenditure, reducing territorial disparities across municipalities. The empirical strategy exploits the unique features of the policy, which entails the allocation of both central-government unconditional and earmarked grants, that are subject to an enforcement mechanism based on mandatory reporting. The policy provides scope for different municipal budgetary responses that could undermine the achievement of social expenditure growth and convergence. We employ a sharp regression discontinuity design based on a treatment assignment rule defined by the difference between municipalities’ standard expenditure needs and historical expenditure. The results reveal a non-negligible effect of earmarked grants in increasing local social expenditure in municipalities with historically low levels of social services, and in fostering convergence in expenditure levels. This effect appears to operate through an increase in the intensity of service provision, while no significant changes are found in cash transfers or funding for social services facilities.

ABSTRACT. The relationship between fiscal decentralization and economic growth remains a central and highly debated issue in the fiscal federalism literature. This paper contributes to this debate through a case study of Trentino-Alto Adige, an autonomous region in Italy characterized by extensive legislative, administrative and financial powers. The analysis exploits two institutional features: Italy’s asymmetric regional autonomy, reflected in the coexistence of ordinary- and special-statute regions, including Trentino-Alto Adige, and the region’s transition from formal to effective fiscal autonomy in the mid-1980s. Using the synthetic control method, the observed evolution of GDP per capita in Trentino-Alto Adige is compared with a counterfactual built from ordinary-statute Italian regions. The results show a persistent positive post-1986 gap, robust to placebo tests, donor-removal checks, and a synthetic difference-in-differences cross-check.

ABSTRACT. Spatially concentrated urban congestion creates a mismatch between where external costs arise, where fiscal instruments are chosen, and where political support must be assembled. This paper studies that problem in an urban overtourism model with a congested core and a peripheral receiving margin. Tourism demand is downward sloping, local welfare is congestion-sensitive, and policy can operate through visitor caps, tourism taxes, and costly spatial deconcentration. Four regimes are compared: a core-oriented cap, a core-oriented tax, a metropolitan cap, and a metropolitan tax-and-deconcentration regime. Analytically, a core tax strictly dominates a core cap because it implements the same allocation while generating revenue; a metropolitan cap weakly dominates a core cap because it optimizes the quantity margin under the metropolitan objective. The metropolitan tax-and-deconcentration regime adds both a fiscal margin and a costly spatial margin, so its aggregate ranking is not treated as a general dominance theorem. Numerical exercises show that it can deliver the largest metropolitan welfare over the admissible calibrated ranges considered. The paper then sep- arates aggregate efficiency from local support. Conditional on an aggregate gain, the set of revenue-sharing and cost-sharing rules that makes both jurisdictions weakly better off is a strip in the fiscal-assignment plane. The results imply that effective overtourism policy requires metropolitan fiscal design, not only pricing, quantity control, or visitor dispersion.

ABSTRACT. Public–private partnerships (PPPs) are widely used to finance and deliver infrastructure projects, particularly in developing and emerging economies facing fiscal constraints. PPP arrangements differ substantially in their governance structures and in the degree of private sector involvement. While existing studies mainly analyse PPP governance at the project level, less is known about cross-country patterns in PPP governance structures. This paper provides a macro-level analysis using a country–year dataset constructed from the World Bank’s Private Participation in Infrastructure (PPI) database. Institutional quality is measured using the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) and the Index of Economic Freedom (IEF). We examine both the determinants of PPP adoption and the governance structures of PPP projects. Our findings suggest that regulatory quality is associated with PPP adoption in pooled specifications, while sectoral composition, especially the share of energy projects, is more robustly associated with PPP organizational forms.

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates the impact of the 2011 UNESCO serial designation Longobards in Italy. Places of the Power (568–774 A.D.) on nearby real estate markets. Exploiting the unique features of a single designation spanning multiple municipalities and regions, we combine nonparametric spatial analysis and difference-in-differences estimation using Italian municipal data from 2006–2019. We show that UNESCO designation generates positive and spatially localized effects on property values, extending up to roughly 25–30 km from designated sites. Effects are strongest for luxury dwellings and are larger in Southern, non-touristic, and institutionally stronger municipalities, highlighting the importance of local context in mediating heritage-related economic benefits.

ABSTRACT. We estimate how local femicides affect voting and turnout in subsequent Italian parliamentary elections. We merge a geocoded registry of femicides (2011–2022) with municipality-level results for the national elections (2013, 2018, 2022) and exploit staggered exposure to a municipality’s first femicide. Using difference-in-differences estimators designed for staggered adoption, we find an electoral backlash against the Center-Right coalition: its vote share falls by about 2.2 percentage points, with offsetting gains for the Five Star Movement (+1.0 pp) and the Center-Left (+0.5 pp). Femicides also reduce participation: turnout declines by about 0.8 percentage points, with larger declines among women than men. Heterogeneity by nationality suggests that backlash is concentrated in cases involving Italian victims or Italian perpetrators; when the perpetrator is foreign, the Center-Right effect is small and statistically indistinguishable from zero. The results are consistent with electoral sanctioning and demobilization following salient failures of protection, with attribution shaped by identity cues.

ABSTRACT. Turnout gaps persist across social groups and thus limit effective political representation, despite the scope of universal suffrage. The gaps may arise from informal barriers rooted in social norms and beliefs about who should and should not vote. This paper analyzes the role of gender norms and social pressure in shaping the gender gap in voter turnout in Switzerland. A triple-difference design exploits three sources of variation: results of the 1971 referendum on female suffrage to measure (male) local norms about whether women should vote, gender differences in turnout, and the staggered introduction of postal voting between 1978 and 2005, which reduced the observability of voting and the social pressure linked to it. Before postal voting, women in municipalities with more regressive norms voted significantly less, resulting in a wider gender turnout gap. This gap decreases by approximately 80% when voting becomes less observable, mainly due to higher turnout among women in regressive areas. These findings show that turnout gaps are not only due to preferences, but they are also influenced by social norms, and that reducing observability through institutional reforms can weaken social pressure, enhance representation, and strengthen universal suffrage.

ABSTRACT. This paper estimates the causal effect of easing access to divorce on intimate partner violence (IPV). We study two divorce law reforms approved in Italy that substantially reduced both the monetary costs and mandatory waiting periods required to obtain a divorce, generating a sharp and heterogeneous increase in divorce rates nationwide. Economic theory yields ambiguous predictions: by strengthening outside options, easier divorce may deter violence through intra-household bargaining, yet it may also increase violence if separation triggers coercive control or retaliatory behavior. To address concerns about endogenous reporting of IPV—particularly salient when legal options change—we focus on femicides, the most extreme form of IPV, which, crucially for our purposes, are less subject to underreporting and measurement error. We combine administrative data on the universe of divorces with a novel dataset on femicides, and we exploit plausibly exogenous variation in municipalities’ exposure to the reform, arising from differential impacts across age groups combined with local differences in population age composition. We find that greater access to divorce increases the incidence of femicide. The effect is primarily driven by killings perpetrated within the family environment.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines how efficiently European welfare states convert social expenditure into socioeconomic outcomes. Using a panel of 25 EU countries (2009–2019), we construct a composite Social Protection Performance Index (SPPI) across the domains of health, education, and social security and inclusion. A stochastic frontier model à la Battese and Coelli (1995) is then employed to estimate efficiency and to assess how institutional, fiscal, demographic, and political factors shape cross country differences. Domain specific frontiers and robustness checks complement the analysis. Results show that higher social spending is associated with better outcomes, but efficiency varies widely. Strong rule of law, sound fiscal governance, higher income levels, and greater female political representation reduce inefficiency, while high public debt constrains performance. Migration dynamics and population density exert heterogeneous effects across policy areas. Overall, the findings indicate that institutional and structural conditions are more decisive than spending levels alone, offering new insights for the design of more efficient social protection policies in Europe.

ABSTRACT. We study voters’ relative income misperceptions among over 19,000 respondents across all 27 countries of the European Union. To our knowledge, ours is the largest such study to date. We document that voter income misperceptions are widespread and share key characteristics across EU countries, with most respondents misperceiving their relative income by more than one decile. The pattern reflects a “middle class bias,” with more (less) affluent respondents more often displaying a negative (positive) bias. Further, average misperceptions are negative in all EU countries. At the country level, average misperceptions decrease with GDP per capita. At the individual level, older, more educated and urban residents exhibit less bias. We further implement a randomized information treatment informing respondents of their household’s actual relative income. While our results indicate that misperceptions exist and exhibit similar patterns and correlations across the EU, the treatment effects are more dispersed. In some countries, people who learn they are wealthier than previously thought decrease their demand for redistribution, while in others they do not change or want more redistribution.

ABSTRACT. Redistribution and environmental protection are central pillars of sustainable development and core topics in welfare economics and collective choice. Higher-income individuals are typically less supportive of income redistribution, yet often show stronger commitment to environmental protec- tion as a global public good. However, this relationship may depend on fairness views and on whether income is perceived as fairly earned or derived from inherited advantages. This paper examines how attitudes toward redistribution and pro-environmental commitment depend on income levels, in- come composition, and fairness preferences. Using data from the European Social Survey Round 8 (2016–2017), we decompose income into an equitable component and advantage-based components reflecting individual and inherited social advantages. Consistent with prior literature, higher income predicts lower support for redistribution but stronger environmental commitment. However, this aggregate pattern masks important heterogeneity. The effect of the equitable component of income does not vary across different fairness views. By contrast, inherited advantages are treated differ- ently depending on fairness orientations. Egalitarian individuals support redistributing inherited advantages in both economic and environmental domains, whereas meritocratic individuals tend to regard them as legitimate intergenerational transmissions, avoiding contributions in both domains. Overall, the findings highlight the crucial role of the income generation process and its interaction with fairness preferences in dealing with economic and environmental resources.

ABSTRACT. This study investigates the effects of minimum wage on health outcomes, leveraging on several reforms that progressively increased income levels for workers in Spain. These reforms represent one of the largest MW increases among OECD countries and the largest in Spain since 1977. Such significant and persistent changes in Spanish minimum wage policy constitute an excellent case study for understanding the health-related effects of this policy reform. Drawing on data from the Spanish Survey of Living Conditions (ES-SILC), we estimate the effect of minimum wage on self-reported health of workers aged 16 to 67 during the period 2012 to 2023. We employ Difference in Difference estimations with multiple timing model developed by Callaway and Sant’Anna (CSDID), which allows for heterogeneous treatment effects. The results of our study suggests that increases the minimum wage are associated with modest improvements in self-reported health. Our results are robust across a range of alternative specifications and robustness checks. We also explore several potential channels -such as unmet medical care needs and dietary and life style patterns- and conduct several heterogeneity analysis. Our findings support earlier studies suggesting that minimum wage may be a useful policy tool not only to improve working conditions and reduce income inequalities, but also to promote public health and reduce health inequalities.

ABSTRACT. This paper evaluates the short and medium-term effectiveness of payroll tax reductions aimed at promoting the permanent conversion of temporary contracts through social contribution exemptions. Using rich administrative data from Tuscany, providing detailed employment histories, we exploit a unique change in eligibility criteria in 2018 to estimate the causal impact of these exemptions. We find that the incentives immediately increased the probability of conversion, with no evidence of substitution against non-eligible cohorts. However, these positive effects were short-lived and appear to reflect anticipated conversions. Indeed, in the medium term, we find no persistent effects on a broad set of employment outcomes – including whether the worker remains in the same permanent job, holds any permanent position, continues working in the same firm or sector, and how long has kept working – and no evidence of heterogeneous effects across firm or worker characteristics.

ABSTRACT. Place-based policies are increasingly used to address persistent regional disparities, yet relatively little is known about how territorial conditions shape the distribution of policy beneficiaries across population groups. This paper investigates whether local socio-economic and institutional environments are systematically associated with gender differences in access to entrepreneurship support programmes — a dimension of policy inclusiveness that standard evaluations focused on average treatment effects tend to overlook. We focus on Resto al Sud, one of Italy's largest place- based entrepreneurship schemes, which provides grants and subsidised loans to support new business creation across Southern Italy. Using original administrative data on all funded projects between 2018 and 2023, we construct a municipal-level cross-sectional dataset covering 1,497 municipalities and develop two symmetric indicators capturing gender disparities in programme participation and per- capita funding allocation. The analysis relates these indicators to local economic conditions, demographic structure, productive specialisation, and institutional quality. Results reveal substantial territorial heterogeneity in gendered access to the programme. Municipalities with higher income levels exhibit smaller gender gaps, while territories with a stronger prevalence of employment income and traditional entrepreneurial structures display larger disparities in favour of men. Strikingly, among the dimensions of institutional quality considered, only bureaucratic capacity emerges as a robust predictor of more balanced participation outcomes, whereas political and economic dimensions of institutional quality are unrelated to gender disparities. These findings suggest that formally gender-neutral entrepreneurship policies may generate systematically uneven distributive outcomes depending on local territorial conditions, and that administrative capacity is a key mechanism through which place shapes women's access to public support. More broadly, the paper contributes to the literature on place-based development by highlighting the importance of incorporating territorial heterogeneity into the design and evaluation of policies that are intended to be inclusive.

ABSTRACT. This paper studies the long-term economic impact of malaria eradication in post-war Italy, one of the first countries to implement a nationwide campaign (1947–mid 1950s). Using a new panel dataset (1911–1981) and a matched difference-in-differences approach, we compare historically malarial areas to non-malarial areas with similar pre-treatment characteristics. We find that eradication significantly accelerated structural transformation, boosting industrial and manufacturing employment. These effects unfolded gradually and are robust to controls for confounding policies and divergent local growth paths. Mechanism analysis reveals that eradication raised agricultural productivity by enabling a more efficient crop mix and fostering mechanization, particularly where potential for modernization was highest.

ABSTRACT. We study the relationship between sulphur mining activity and human capital in nineteenth-century Sicily. Cross-sectional and panel fixed-effect estimates show a negative association between sulphur mining activity and primary school enrolment. The implementation of the Coppino law in 1877, which extended compulsory education and introduced fines for non-compliance is associated with higher school enrolment but differentially lower in sulphur-rich municipalities.

ABSTRACT. Using a combination of individual-level, bioclimatic, ethnographic, and archaeological data, we investigate the ancient origins of cross-country variation in preferences for redistribution. Our hypothesis is that contemporary attitudes toward redistribution are shaped by ancestral inequality, which arose as an endogenous adaptation of pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherer societies to seasonal food shortages induced by the seasonality of the wild progenitors of domesticated crops. Employing contemporary survey data and an epidemiological approach, we first show that migrants originating from countries characterized by higher ancestral inequality exhibit lower support for redistribution, and that this relationship is driven by the degree of crop seasonality in the migrants’ origin countries. Next, using data on premodern societies, we show that crop seasonality induces food storage practices, which in turn lead to inequality. The positive effect of food storage on inequality is corroborated by data from archaeological sites. Finally, drawing on data from preindustrial polities, we uncover that the mechanism linking food storage to redistributive preferences operates through the positive influence of the former on tolerance for inequality.

ABSTRACT. Italy, a latecomer country to industrialization, faced the hurdles of lacking coal in the age of steam. When the technology for long-distance electricity transmission became available, it invested heavily in hydropower. By 1911, 42.7% of Italy’s installed industrial power came from hydroelectricity. Using methodologies rooted in New Economic Geography (NEG) and factor endowment theories, we analyze the location of industrial activity across Italian provinces during the census years 1901 and 1911. We evaluate the influence of electric power as a distinct factor alongside traditional determinants such as market potential, human capital, and energy intensity. Our approach incorporates new data on GDP, literacy, and energy stocks, enabling a fine-grained analysis at the NUTS-3 level. Dependent variables include provincial shares of industrial employment and GDP, regressed on interactions between industrial and provincial characteristics. Baseline OLS findings highlight the role of electricity in industrial location, with its influence growing markedly between 1901 and 1911. Alternative specifications and instrumental variable techniques confirm these results, underscoring electricity’s transformative role in reducing Italy’s dependence on water-powered manufacturing. These findings align with broader interpretations of electrification’s role in enabling industrial diversification and regional economic development during the Second Industrial Revolution.

ABSTRACT. This study investigates the impact of intra-curricula internships on intentions, aspirations and labor market performance of Italian graduates. We rely on a national-level official survey conducted by AlmaLaurea whose coverage and scope allow us to investigate the impact of internships by leveraging information on courses with different internship modalities, both across programs and over time. Overall, the findings underscore the importance of internships in facilitating the choice to enter the labor market with significant differences between the two cycles of study characterizing the Bologna process. 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 reducing inactivity though at same time decreasing enrollment propensity in the second-cycle. Additionally, internships enhance job match quality by reducing skill and educational mismatch. Graduates job aspirations are also affected, though only for male students. The results highlight internships as a key for smoothing the university-to-work transition, guiding policymakers and educational institutions in enhancing graduate employment outcomes through targeted strategies.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores the evolution of within couples inequality in seven large European countries (Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Poland, Romania, and the Netherlands) by using three waves of European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions survey (2005, 2014, and 2024). By considering a sample of cohabiting couples (married or in a formal/informal consensual union), we offer both a descriptive and econometric analyses of the female shares in household income. We estimate a zero-one inflated beta model, that enables us to jointly model three distinct margins, i.e. female nonparticipation, sole female breadwinning, and relative earnings among dual-earner couples. We include female, partner, and household characteristics. Our findings suggest a primary role of high female educational attainment against the risk of contributing nothing in household income. Among household characteristics, we note a negative role of household structure, i.e. household size and presence of young children, and a positive role of living conditions (as measured by the number of rooms in the house). Notably, we do not find a clear role for partner characteristics. Overall, the results highlight both convergence and persistence: while female economic participation within couples has increased over time, differences across countries and educational groups remain relevant.

ABSTRACT. This paper studies whether female political representation affects the transparency of public procurement. We focus on Italian municipalities and exploit the gender-balance requirement introduced by Law 56/2014 for municipal executive committees. Using the staggered timing of municipal elections and the population threshold embedded in the reform, we instrument the share of female aldermen with exposure to gender-quota elections. We combine political data from the Italian Ministry of the Interior with contract-level procurement data managed and financed by municipal administrations. The main outcomes measure the use of direct awards and bunching below the threshold, where procurement rules allowed more discretionary procedures. The results show that a 1%-point increase in the share of female aldermen reduces the share of direct awards by about 0.30%-points and reduces bunching below the threshold by 1.45%-points. Mechanism and additional analyses suggest that the effects are more pronounced in disability-related social procurement, are related to municipal institutional quality, and are stronger in the North-Center. Overall, the evidence is consistent with the view that female executive representation affects not only spending priorities, but also the administrative practices through which public resources are allocated.

ABSTRACT. This paper studies how public procurement competition changed in Europe after COVID-19. Using OpenTender tender-level data, we construct a NUTS3-region-by-year panel for 32 European countries from 2016 to 2024 and measure competition through the regional mix of procurement procedures, ranging from outright awards to open tenders. We estimate fixed-effects panel models linking this competition index to regional market size, time trends, and post-2020 shifts, with additional analyses by country and supply type.

ABSTRACT. This paper studies whether public procurement increases the profitability of private firms located in the awarding municipality. Using linked administrative data for Italian municipalities from 2015–2024, we combine ANAC contract records with AIDA firm‑level balance sheets to measure local procurement exposure by contract type—works, supplies, and services—and to construct municipality‑year aggregates of value added, EBITDA, and labor costs. To address staggered treatment timing, we apply the did‑multiplegt dyn estimator, which uses only not‑yet‑treated or never‑treated municipalities as valid controls and recovers dynamic treatment effects. Placebo tests confirm parallel trends and no anticipation. Results show that procurement significantly raises firm profitability: EBITDA increases in the first year, peaks over the following two years, and fades by year four, consistent with a temporary revenue boost tied to contract execution. Per‑worker specifications indicate that the effect operates at the intensive margin rather than through employment growth. Crucially, the entire effect is driven by works contracts. Supplies and services yield precisely estimated null results, reflecting their lower local economic incidence. The findings imply that the local multiplier of procurement depends on contract composition, not only spending volume, with direct relevance for the design of Italy’s NRRP as well as other EU funds.