PUBLISHED papers

ABSTRACT:

We estimate the impact of air pollution on workplace accidents and permanent disabilities in Italy, a setting characterized by stringent air pollution and work safety regulations. Using daily administrative data between 2014 and 2018, we leverage winter heating regulations and atmospheric dynamics to address the endogeneity of air pollution generation and exposure. We find an elasticity of accidents with respect to particulate matter (PM10) of 0.12 and estimate no effect of pollution on disabilities. Using age groups as a proxy for work experience, we find larger impacts for less experienced workers. Increasing PM10 by 10 μg/m3 would raise the average cost of an accident by 78 euros (7.3%); employers bear 60% of this cost, and public insurers bear 40%.

ABSTRACT:

I adapt the approach in Buckles and Hungerman (2013) to show that in several European Union (EU) countries, between 2004 and 2020, the characteristics of the mothers giving birth in different quarters are significantly different. An implication of this finding is that quarter of birth is not a valid instrument in several applications where it has been used, e.g. return to education, even within the EU context. Beyond standard methods, partial identification techniques may help address this limitation.

ABSTRACT:

This paper investigates the factors that shape earnings inequality, using administrative matched employer-employee data from the Italian Social Security Institute (INPS), between 1990 and 2021. It reveals that inequality in annual earnings rose steadily over time according to various measures, such as the Gini index, the interquartile ranges, and the variance. When exploring the mechanisms behind such an increase, it shows that the rise in inequality is driven by the quantity of work, which varied heterogeneously across workers, as atypical contracts (e.g., part-time and fixed-term) became widespread in the economy. We compare these measures based on the annual compensation of workers with those based on full-time equivalent weekly wages, which display a much less dispersed evolution over time, except during the double-dip recession in 2008-2012. Finally, we document a large persistence, increasing over time, in disadvantaged positions both in the short- and in the long-run. 

ABSTRACT:

Using the Consumer Expectations Survey of the ECB, I estimate how individual expectations on core economic outcomes changed in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain right after the beginning of the Ukraine-Russia war. I find that individuals expected lower economic growth and higher inflation. The effect of the war was larger in the countries with a higher energy-imports dependency. Hence, the expectation formation process might have changed.

ABSTRACT:

Hiring subsidies are among the most widely used policies to support employment growth for certain groups of workers or disadvantaged geographic areas. In this article, we analyze the medium-run consequences of a generous, non-targeted permanent hiring subsidy implemented throughout Italy in 2015, which was widely used by firms. The results indicate that firms benefiting from the subsidy increased in size. However, compared to other firms, the growth rate of capital-labour ratio and value added per worker were lower after the subsidy. We conclude that policies to stimulate hiring must be accompanied by other interventions to support capital accumulation. 

ABSTRACT:

Exploiting very rich administrative data covering the period from January 2018 until December 2021, this study analyses the individual employment trajectories of a large random sample of Italian workers during the pandemic and the subsequent recovery, comparing them with similar individuals in previous years. To understand the heterogeneous impact of the crisis on the workforce, we split the sample based on workers’ labour market status in the first four months of 2020: (i) those continuously employed, (ii) those who lost their job, and (iii) those not employed (either new entrants or with previous work experience). While workers in the first group were more likely to keep their job during the pandemic than in the past, the others faced scarce employment prospects for a prolonged period. The probability to find a job decreased sharply for labour market entrants, amplifying pre-existing differences. Finally, we do not find evidence of significant cross-firms or cross-sectors reallocation. 

ABSTRACT:

The European Union (EU) is considering abolishing Daylight Saving Time (DST), i.e. the two-phase time arrangement that shifts back and forth the clock time. I estimate the causal effect of DST on accidents at work using administrative data from Italy between 2013 and 2017. Exploiting a Regression Discontinuity design, I find asymmetric results. The number of injuries increases by 2% in the first three days after the introduction of DST, but the effect vanishes afterwards; neither disabilities nor deaths are affected. When leaving DST, the number of injuries decreases by more than 10% and disabilities by a smaller amount; these effects vanish after one week. The effects of DST, including asymmetry, depend on sleeping behaviour and ambient light. The asymmetric results imply that monetary savings from a smaller number of injuries will be lost if the EU repeals the two-phase time arrangement; however, these advantages are tiny and short-lived. 

ABSTRACT:

We study the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic during the first semester of 2020 on the labor market outcomes of elderly workers, using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). We measure the gender gap in the conditional mean of the probability of experiencing a job interruption, of changing the number of hours worked, and of working from home. We control for a rich set of observable characteristics, including several measures of cognitive and non-cognitive ability. We apply decomposition methods to distinguish, on the one hand, the part of the gap that is due to gender differences in the endowments of the determinants of the outcome in question and, on the other, to gender differences in the effects of these determinants. We find that there is no gender gap in the probability of experiencing a job interruption nor in the probability of working fewer hours than before the pandemic. In contrast, there were significant differences in the probability of increasing the amount of worked hours or working remotely, which were larger for females in both cases. For the latter variable, the difference is largely attributable to different endowments between men and women. However, the gap in the probability of working longer hours is mostly attributable to the coefficients component.

ABSTRACT

In this paper I use administrative data to estimate the number of deaths, the number of infections, and mortality rates from Covid-19 in Lombardia, the hot spot of the disease in Italy and Europe. The information will assist policy makers in reaching correct decisions and the public in adopting appropriate behaviours. As the available data suffer from sample selection bias, I use partial identification to derive the above quantities. Partial identification combines assumptions with the data to deliver a set of admissible values, or bounds. Stronger assumptions yield stronger conclusions but decrease the credibility of the inference. Therefore, I start with assumptions that are always satisfied, then I impose increasingly more restrictive assumptions. Using my preferred bounds, during March 2020 in Lombardia there were between 10000 and 18500 more deaths than in previous years. The narrowest bounds of mortality rates from Covid-19 are between 0.1% and 7.5%, much smaller than the 17.5% discussed in earlier reports. This finding suggests that the case of Lombardia may not be as special as some argue.

ABSTRACT

Existing estimates of the public/private wage gap allow for possible sorting of individuals into one sector, but they rely on parametric assumptions that may introduce substantial bias in the parameter of interest. Solutions are semi and nonparametric approaches. For Italy, the latter methods yield a gap of approximately 20\%, whereas the bias from parametric assumptions is as large as 10%.

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the relation between adherence to prescribed medication  and reduction of cholesterol in Italy, taking into account the possible sorting of patients into treatment and the heterogeneity of the effect. As predicted by a theoretical model, I find that patients who benefit most from medication are more likely to adhere to prescribed regime than those who benefit least. These results are used to study the effects of three hypothetical  policies that aim at increasing the share of patients adherent to prescribed medication: one policy is directed towards patients, one towards physicians, and one towards both patients and physicians. For each policy I describe the observable characteristics of patients induced into treatment. Although the policy with the highest return is directed towards patients, the policies differ substantially with respect to the population affected. Therefore, a policy with lower return that  targets better the desired population may be preferred to the policy with the highest return.

ABSTRACT

This paper estimates the causal effects on health-related outcomes of recovery plans that were implemented in some Italian regions in the period 2007-12. Using administrative data, for regions that underwent the program the paper estimates negative effects on hospitalization and (to some extent) mortality rates, without gains in terms of efficiency. The lower the reduction of expenditures, the less severe the consequences on health outcomes. Since the assumptions required by standard methods do not hold for this analysis, the main contribution of the paper is the application of bounds, that are valid under mild conditions.

ABSTRACT

This paper reviews some of the standard assumptions that are imposed in order to estimate the average public/private wage gap and that are mainly related to the possible selection of the sector. There are two contributions to the existing public/private wage gap literature. One is a better understanding of the identified parameters: standard estimators identify a local effect (LATE), which in general cannot be generalized to the entire population, as instead is almost always done.The other is the partial identification of the population average treatment effect, with an instrumental variable.To the best of my knowledge, this is the first paper in this literature that employs bounds. The technique is applied to male workers in Italy. For compliers, LATE estimates a wage advantage from working in the public sector greater than 30%.This return is within the narrowest bounds on the population average treatment effect, that are consistent even with a much smaller gap (about 15% or more).

ABSTRACT

Understanding the role that drug adherence has on health outcomes in everyday clinical practice is central for the policy maker. This is particularly true when patients su.er from asymptomatic chronic conditions (e.g., hypertension, hypercholesterolemia and diabetes). By exploiting a unique longitudinal dataset at patient and physician level in Italy, we show that patients and physicians unobserved characteristics play an important role in determining health status, at least as important as drug adherence. Most importantly, we .find that both adherence and prescribed treatment regimen e.ffects are highly heterogeneous across physicians, highlighting their crucial role in shaping patients' health status.

ABSTRACT

We uncover the short- and long-run structural determinants of the existing cross-country heterogeneity in public-private pay diff.erentials for a broad set of OECD countries. We explore micro data (EU-SILC, 2004-2012) and macro data (1970-2014). Three results stand out. First, when looking at pay gaps based on individual data, more than half of the cross-sectional variation of the sample can be accounted for by the degree of exposure to international competition, as well as by the size of the public sector labor force and its composition (i.e. the intensity in the provision of pure public goods), while labor market institutions play a very limited role. Second, we fi.nd that in some countries pay gaps have  narrowed down signi.cantly during the recent fi.nancial crisis, this decrease being explained by the widespread process of .fiscal consolidation rather than by changes in the previous factors. Third, we show that in the log-run openness to international trade and improvements in the institutional quality of governments are associated with decreases in the public-private wage gap. Our .findings can be rationalized by a body of research stressing non-competitive wage settlements in the public sector.

ABSTRACT

Since 2012 the Italian Government made several steps to repay its commercial debts. By using a composite dataset, we evaluate the effect of these policies on the financial performances of a representative sample of Italian firms. We distinguish between firms beneficiaries of these repayments, those that were not repaid, although they had a legitimate right, and those that did not have commercial relations with the General Government. We find that receiving money had a significant positive impact on firms’ financial position.

ABSTRACT

We evaluate the public-private wage differential for men in ten euro-area countries in the period 2004--2007. Using the most recent methodologies on a Mincerian equation, we assess how much of the differential depends on differences in endowments and how much on differences in the remuneration of such skills. For the first time, we look at the contribution of specific covariates at different quantiles of the wage distribution and decompose the variance into an explained and an unexplained component. We find that the pay gap is often decreasing over the distribution, and that it is mostly determined by higher endowments in the upper tail of the wage distribution and by higher returns of such endowments at the low tail, with considerable heterogeneity across countries. We further find that the wage distribution in the public sector is more compressed than in the private sector in some countries. This is the result, for all countries, of more dispersed distributions of endowments in the public sector and of returns in the private sector.

ABSTRACT:

We investigate the public-private wage differentials in ten euro area countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain). To account for differences in employment characteristics between the two sectors, we focus on micro data taken from EU-SILC. The results point to a conditional pay differential in favour of the public sector that is generally higher for women, at the low tail of the wage distribution, in the Education and the Public administration sectors rather than in the Health sector. Notable differences emerge across countries, with Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain exhibiting higher public sector premia than other countries.

ABSTRACT

Questo lavoro esamina il fenomeno dei ritardi di pagamento delle Amministrazioni pubbliche italiane. Il principale contributo che offre al dibattito è rappresentato da nuove stime sullo stock dei debiti commerciali e sui tempi di pagamento per gli anni 2008-2014 che, rispetto a quelle pubblicate annualmente nella Relazione annuale della Banca d’Italia, incorporano alcuni affinamenti metodologici. Il lavoro, inoltre, esamina la distribuzione dei debiti commerciali rispetto ad alcune caratteristiche delle imprese creditrici (settore economico, dimensione, area geografica, intensità di rapporti con il settore pubblico) e fornisce elementi utili per una valutazione dell’efficacia del programma di esborsi statali per lo smaltimento dell’arretrato realizzato nel biennio 2013-14.

ABSTRACT

Over the last decades spatial econometrics models  have  represented a common tool for measuring spillover effects across different geographical entities (counties, provinces, regions or nations). The aim of this paper is to investigate the issue of measuring spatial spillovers in presence of institutional constraints that can be geographically defined. In these cases, assuming that spatial effects are not affected by the institutional setting may produce biased estimates due to the composition of two distinct sources of spatial dependence. Our approach is based on redefining the contiguity structure so as to account for the institutional constraints using two different contiguity matrices: the within matrix, which defines contiguity among units obeying to the same institutional setting, and the between  matrix, which traces spatial linkages among contiguous units across different jurisdictions. This approach allows to disentangle the two sources of spatial correlation and to easily test for the existence of binding institutional constraints. From the econometric perspective, we extend Lacombe (2004a) approach to incorporate the aforementioned institutional constraints in a spatial Durbin model with individual specific slopes, while inference is conducted using a two-way cluster robust variance-covariance matrix controlling for both spatial and time correlation. We apply this methodology to analyze spatial dependence of per-capita public health expenditures in Italy at Local Health Authorities level using a balanced panel dataset from 2001 to 2005. Our results show robust evidence of a significant and positive spatial coefficient for the within effect, while the between effect, although significant, is very close to zero, thus confirming the importance and validity of the proposed approach.

ABSTRACT

This paper presents estimates of the welfare and poverty effects of a price increase in a major food commodity in an underdeveloped country. We use household data from a Zambian survey to estimate a demand system with which various price scenarios can be simulated for the main Zambian staple and its possible effects on different population categories. Our results show that a 50 per cent increase in maize prices could lead to an average consumption decrease of 17 per cent among Zambian households, and overall poverty could rise from 68 to 70 per cent fairly quickly at national level.

ABSTRACT

In this paper we analyze the process of assimilation of immigrants in terms of earnings within European societies, using a panel dataset. Because not all the population is employed, we model the sample selection mechanism preserving the panel structure of our dataset, differently from usual approaches. We also generalize the estimators to consider the possible endogeneity between earnings and length of stay in the host country. From OLS we conclude that the assimilation process is strong, however, using a Fixed-Effects estimator or an attrition bias FE estimator, results change dramatically: the assimilation hypothesis in earnings is rejected; nevertheless, there is assimilation in the employment mechanism. 

ABSTRACT:

This paper investigates whether a public sector premium exists even after controlling for observable characteristics and for additional motivations, other than monetary, that may induce workers to prefer employment in the public sector. We do this by studying the entire conditional wage distribution on Italian micro data, covering the period 1998-2008. The evidence under random sampling shows the existence of a wage differential averaging at about 14% for women and 4% for men, generally lower at the high tail of the wage distribution and in the Northern regions. The premium significantly increases when possible sorting is considered; the correction is particularly large above the median of the wage distribution, therefore suggesting that the additional motivations may play an important role above all at higher wage levels. When we restrict our comparison to large private firms, a differential is confirmed for women but not for men.

ABSTRACT:

In this article, we describe screening, a new Stata command for data management that can be used to examine the content of complex narrative-text variables to identify one or more user-defined keywords. The command is useful when dealing with string data contaminated with abbreviations, typos, or mistakes. A rich set of options allows a direct translation from the original narrative string to a user-defined standard coding scheme. Moreover, screening is flexible enough to facilitate the merging of information from different sources and to extract or reorganize the content of string variables.

ABSTRACT:

Many economic time series exhibit important systematic fluctuations within the year, i.e., seasonality. In contrast to usual practice, I argue that using original data should always be considered, although the process is more complicated than that of using seasonally adjusted data. Motivations to use unadjusted data come from the information contained in their peaks and troughs and from economic theory. One major complication is the possible unit root at seasonal frequencies. In this article, I tackle the issue of implementing a test to identify the source of seasonality. In particular, I follow Hylleberg et al. (1990, Journal of Econometrics 44: 215–238) for quarterly data.

ABSTRACT:

In this article I propose two different models for analyzing the conduct of monetary policy, facing certain expectations. The first is a autoregressive model, which implicitly accounts for adaptive expectations, while the second accounts for the rational expectations. I used these models to judge whether or not the Taylor rule can be a good benchmark for the conduct of monetary policy in Japan. The conclusion is that a simple AR model fits the data better than the Taylor rule, and that assuming rational expectations in Japan could be highly misleading, at least since the mid-1990s.

ABSTRACT:

This paper analyzes the evidence provided by the European Community Household Panel (ECHP), a longitudinal household survey which covers a wide range of topics, giving comparable information across the member states of the European Union before the 2004 enlargment. The ECHP allows us to follow the process of integration into the European labor markets of the cohorts of immigrants that reached Western Europe before the mid-1990s. Our goal is to provide a detailed description of labor market outcomes for those countries for which reliable data are available, distinguishing between natives and immigrants, and conditioning on a variety of personal characteristics. In particular, we ask two questions that we consider important. First, whether there are significant differences in labor market outcomes of natives and immigrants, and to what extent these differences may be accounted for by differences in the observed characteristics of the two groups. Second, how much of the residual differences in labor market outcomes of natives and immigrants—namely those differences that are not accounted for by differences in observed characteristics—persist after a sufficiently long residence of immigrants in the host country. We find that labor market outcomes differ significantly between natives and immigrants, especially those from non EU-15 countries: other things being equal, immigrants tend to have worse labor market outcomes than natives, although the impact of most covariates (age, educational attainments and marital status) is strikingly similar between the two groups. Further, the differences between natives and immigrants diminish as the length of stay in the country increases. After about 20 years of residence, most differences between immigrants and natives are gone. Our positive conclusions may not generalize to the cohorts of immigrants that reached Western Europe after the mid-1990s. They may also be difficult to generalize to the non-negligible fraction of immigrants who dropped out of the ECHP sample or could not be included into the first wave of the survey because of problems with the sampling frame, non-contact, language difficulties, or refusal to participate

ABSTRACT:

Policy makers in migrant-receiving countries must often strike a delicate balance between economic needs, that would dictate a substantial increase in the number of foreign workers, and political and electoral imperatives, that typically result in highly restrictive immigration policies. Promoting integration of migrants into the host country would go a long way in alleviating the trade off between economic and political considerations. While there is a large literature on the economic assimilation of immigrants, somewhat less attention has been devoted to other – and equally crucial – dimensions of migrants’ integration, namely the process of social assimilation. The aim of this paper is to take a close look at migrants’ social integration into the host country. We rely on the European Community Household panel (ECHP), which devotes a full module to the role and relevance of social relations for both migrants and natives. An innovative feature of this analysis is that it relies on migrants perceptions about their integration rather than – as is typically the case in most opinion surveys – on natives attitudes toward migrants. The main results of the paper can be summarized as follows. First, migrants – particularly from non EU origins - are at a disadvantage in the fields of social relations. Even after controlling for their individual characteristics, such as age, education, family size, and employment status, they tend to socialize less than natives. Second, migrants tend to converge, albeit quite slowly, to the standard of natives. This finding highlights the risks of short term migration, where migrants tend to be constantly marginalized. Third, education has a significant impact on the type of social activities that individuals undertake. More educated people tend to relate somewhat less with their close neighbourhood, but quite intensively with the broader community. The implication for policy makers concerned about the creation of ethnic enclaves is to promote education among immigrants’ community.

ABSTRACT:

This paper studies the relationship between medical compliance and health outcomes – hospitalization and mortality rates – using a large panel of patients residing in a local health authority in Italy. These data allow us to follow individual patients through all their accesses to public health care services until they either die or leave the local health authority. We adopt a disease specific approach, concentrating on hypertensive patients treated with ACE inhibitors. Our results show that medical compliance has a clear effect on both hospitalization and mortality rates: health outcomes clearly improve when patients become more compliant to drug therapy. At the same time, we are able to infer valuable information on the role that drug co-payment can have on compliance, and as a consequence on health outcomes, by exploiting the presence of two natural experiments during the period of analysis. Our results show that drug co-payment has a strong effect on compliance, and that this effect is immediate.

ABSTRACT:

This paper analyses the Japanese economic growth since 1970 with particular attention for the last decade. After a brief discussion on the qualitative behaviour of macroeconomic variables, a survey of literature presents the ideas of various models. This is useful for the econometric analysis applied here, which consists in a smooth transition model, such as LSTAR. For the last decade a deeper analysis is carried out with a VAR model to test if lending view is necessary in explaining the business cycle. These models suggest that both fiscal and monetary policies were not very efficient. Total lending also accelerated the crisis.