PovChild

The effects of poverty on child well-being and opportunities: new measures and causal evaluations of pre-school interventions (PovChild).

Department of Economics, University of Verona

Project funded by the National Research Programme (PNR) 2021-2027

[Full description of the project in IT]

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POSITIONS ON THE JOB MARKET

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Opened positions within the project (to be filled):

1) One Position for Assistant Professor in Economic Policy (Ricercatore a Tempo Determinato tipo A, 3 years).

[description in ENG] [Official call in IT]

Deadlines:

• submission : November 10, 2021, 12.00PM CEST [submit here],

• interview November 26, 2021 (on Zoom)

• starting date by January 1st, 2022.

2) One Post-Doc position (Assegno di Ricerca, 2 years) working on WP1 and WP2.

[description in ENG] [Official call in IT]

Deadlines:

• submission November 8, 2021, 1.00PM CEST ,

• how to submit: All required documents (see attachments to IT call) have to be sent EXCLUSIVELY in pdf format to the e-mail address: ufficio.protocollo@pec.univr.it within the deadline.

• interview November 16, 2021, 10.00AM CEST (Zoom),

• starting date December 1st, 2021

3) One Post-Doc position (Assegno di Ricerca, 2 years) working on WP3.

[description in ENG] [Official call in IT]

Deadlines:

• submission November 8, 2021, 1.00PM CEST ,

• how to submit: All required documents (see attachments to IT call) have to be sent EXCLUSIVELY in pdf format to the e-mail address: ufficio.protocollo@pec.univr.it within the deadline.

• interview November 15, 2021, 10.00AM CEST (Zoom),

• starting date December 1st, 2021

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Project description and goals:

Income inequality is a phenomenon compatible with an inclusive society, as long as it does not clash with two fundamental and widely shared principles in the literature that define the foundations of the very concept of social inclusiveness: mitigating poverty (freedom from poverty) and guaranteeing equality of opportunity (equality of opportunity). To outline inclusive policies that respect these principles, it is necessary to understand and measure poverty from a multidimensional and intergenerational perspective, as well as accumulate causal evidence on the distributive effects of policies & practices already in use.

The project contributes to the priorities identified in Article 3 "Inequality and Inclusion" in the context of the 5.2.5 "Social Transformations and Society of Inclusion" intervention of the PRN 2021-2027, adopting an empirical perspective to answer the following research questions : What are the most relevant dimensions of poverty between families, within families and between individuals? What new dimensions of inequality and poverty emerged during and after the COVID-19 crisis? What practices and actions can reduce the incidence of the most extreme poverty? Does greater poverty in the family imply greater individual poverty and less well-being of children? Does expanding participation in pre-school education activities favor the social inclusion of future generations?

Work Packages:

WP 1: multidimensional poverty assessment.

To answer some of the questions outlined above, one need to first realize that poverty is not a unidimensional phenomenon. Poverty in income at the household level may be the consequence of adverse health shocks or of unfavorable living conditions. Income poverty may however imply housing poverty, as well as deprivation on important health dimensions and in terms of investments on the future generations. To mitigate poverty in a multidimensional context it is necessary first to assess poverty from a multidimensional perspective. This task requires new methods that are capable of linking material poverty to subjective well-being of the family members, as well as new data that allow to evaluate multidimensional poverty.

The project will develop on the IILS dataset (Della Chiara, Menon, Perali, 2019), obtained by aggregating information at an individual level on consumption, income, use of time, socio-demographic characteristics for a representative sample of Italian families. Data will be expanded (using a consolidated methodology) with the latest available post-COVID19 surveys. Methodologies linked to the measurement of multidimensional poverty (Della Chiara and Perali, 2021) will allow the aggregation of individual information into indicators that vary over time, space and between groups exposed to different redistributive policies. Using a survey with local coverage carried out through poverty support centers (empori) and exploiting the primary data (currently being collected) obtained from a representative sample of the Verona population (N = 1400) within the European STEP project, it will be possible to collect information on the state of food poverty, clothing and physical activity (marginalization indices) at a local level.

Deliverables: two scientific publications, an integrated dataset that will be made available, a new survey.

WP 2: From poverty of the family to poverty in the family.

One important aspect of poverty of the family concerns its intergenerational implications. Families experiencing poverty tend to transmit it to the next generation, violating equality of opportunity. This is not always the case, however. It is the mechanism of allocation of resources within the family that defines the process of transmission: a poor yet resilient family may disproportionally invest resources in their kids, which will not face deprivation. To understand the intergenerational consequences of multidimensional poverty, one needs to formalize household behaviour and estimate sharing rules internal to the household.

We will use models developed in Menon and Perali (2019), among others, and estimate them on IILS data in order to identify how an exogenous shock in certain dimensions relevant to the budget constraint of the family (prices of goods, available resources) spread to its members. The empirical analysis will focus on estimation and simulation through these models, giving particular emphasis to the well-being in children determined by the allocative mechanisms within the family.

Deliverables: a scientific publication, a policy report on child poverty and well-being in Italy.

WP 3: Preschool policies and inequality of opportunity.

Experiencing a poor parental background produce intergenerational consequences in terms of labour market and educational opportunitie of affected kids. Such inequality falls beyond the children responsibility and deserve compensation from a normative and ethical perspective. Educational policies are seen as the mean par excellence to implement equality of opportunity. The recent literature has also highlighted the importance of preschool (for children aged 0 to 6 yo) universal program attendance on long term opportunities (Andreoli et al, 2019). While in many European countries primary and secondary education are free and mandatory, preschool take up is left to the decision of the parents and to their budget constraints (since such services generally charge admission fees). This project develops empirical evidence on the long term consequences of attending the Ecole Maternelle, a large free, universal preschool program available in France since the late XIX Century.

The WP will cover all the phases of the evaluation study. Admin data available to the PI will be matched to available microdata from French Census and from Fiscal admin data. Methods such as DiD, TWFE models and distributional regression methods will be used to assert the empirical relation between exposure to preschool expansion and earnings of the individuals affected by it, exploiting municipality and cohort variation in preschool supply for identification.

Deliverables: a working paper and a policy report.

References:

Andreoli F., T. Havnes e A. Lefranc (2019). Robust inequality of opportunity comparisons: Theory and application to early-childhood policy evaluation, The Review of Economics and Statistics, 101(2):355-369.

Dalla Chiara E., M. Menon e F. Perali (2019). An Integrated Database to Measure Living Standards. Journal of Official Statistics, 35(3):531-576.

Della Chiara E. e F. Perali (2021). Relational Well-Being and Poverty in Italy, in C. Perna, N. Salvati e F. Schirripa Spagnolo, Book of Short Papers SIS 2021 pp. 1057-1062. Pearson

Menon M. e F. Perali (2019). Cost or Raising Children, Child Poverty and Fertility Decisions, Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Sociali, 3:225-263.

People involved:

Francesco Andreoli (University of Verona and LISER) – PI

Simona Fiore (University of Verona)

Martina Menon (University of Verona) – Co-PI

Giulia Montresor (University of Verona)

Eugenio Peluso (University of Verona and LISER)

Federico Perali (University of Verona)

Veronica Polin (University of Verona)

Flavio Santi (University of Verona)

Lucia Schiavon (University of Verona)

Francesca Vitali (University of Verona)

Claudio Zoli (University of Verona)

Arnaud Lefranc (Thema, Cergy-Paris University)

Collaborating institutions:

The Economics Living Lab (http://www.econlivlab.eu/, spin-off of DSE), the European Documentation Centre (EDC) (http://europa.univr.it/), the Cento Interdipartimentale di Documentazione Economica (CIDE) at the University of Verona, and the Thema, Cergy-Paris University, France.