ABSTRACT: Policy knowledge is a crucial component of democratic accountability. Yet, little is known about whether individuals are knowledgeable of public policies. We investigate general patterns of policy knowledge in the population focusing on the EU's Resilience and Recovery Plan (RRP), a euro 723 billion program to mitigate the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a uniquely tailored panel survey, we assess knowledge on both the extensive margin, i.e. whether citizens report being aware of the plan, and the intensive margin, i.e. what effectively people know about the policy details. We identify substantial heterogeneity across socio-demographic groups. Overall, 62% of respondents report being aware of the RRP, but we detect much lower awareness about the plan's financial structure and timeline. We uncover a significant and persistent gender-based literacy gap of around 30%. This gap narrows when questions focus on policy reforms likely more pertinent to female voters.  Exploiting randomized exposure to the availability of the "I don't know" option, we show that, albeit important, gender differences in confidence can't fully explain the difference in knowledge of the financial structure of the plan. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of assessing and addressing gaps in policy knowledge, as they might hinder democratic accountability and policy effectiveness.

ABSTRACT: Health insurance expansions that facilitate access to necessary healthcare can improve health outcomes if they reduce information and financial barriers to health care, especially among poorer people who otherwise cannot afford the costs of new health programmes. We examine whether expanded access to health insurance promotes body growth, allowing individuals to maximise its height potential which we measure by an anthropometric measure of health and well-being—namely human height. We draw our evidence using a panel of countries for which we could measure height inequality retrospectively and control for several relevant control variables, and we produce evidence suggesting that indeed within-country differences in height inequality declined after insurance expansion. Our variable for health insurance explains about 12% of the variation in within-height inequality. We document evidence of a reduction of within-country height inequality following the introduction of health insurance programs. 

ABSTRACT: Community detection in dynamic networks is an open challenge due to the unknown number of blocks and multiple sources of heterogeneity. Dynamic Stochastic Block models (DSBM) provide a suitable framework to identify network structures and changes over time. However, blocks cannot fully capture shifts in connectivity because there are significant within-block differences and common trends that may jeopardize the accuracy of detection. This paper provides a novel unified DSBM which considers both uncertainty on the number of blocks under large flexibility in degree and strength and covariates with community dependent heterogeneous effects. A Monte Carlo Markov Chain merge-split step within an adaptive framework is introduced to cope with poor mixing in number of the communities. Using simulated data, it is shown that the new DSBM correctly retrieves the community membership of the nodes against standard DSBM and the merge-split achieves efficient classification of the nodes. Our methodology is applied to real network data on trade and COVID-19. The results show that the new methodology is able to capture the effect of the global shock on common trends, the heterogeneity in marginal effects and the changes in membership.

ABSTRACT: Through analysis of the international significant literature this paper studies the nature, genesis and main characteristics of a new capitalism business model that came to light in the early 2000s, and fundamentally after the 2008 financial crisis. This new business model is defined as the digital Platform economy. The aim of this paper is defining what a digital Platform is and when, according to the literature, a complex system of software and hardware components, big data, machine learning present on the web can be defined as a digital platform. The paper will also examine the main features of a Platform, some classifications and a description of the role performed by the algorithms in a characteristic platform that organize, check, and evaluate tasks realized by a user’s-workforce: the Lean Platform.

ABSTRACT: This paper exploits a settlement episode from history to study the effects of common origin networks and diversity on economic performance. Between 1932 and 1941, the Italian government settled about 4,000 families in the Pontine Marshes - a previously swampy area that underwent a reclamation project. These families, arriving from various Italian regions under a sharecropping agreement, were assigned to land plots in a quasi-random manner and were given the option to redeem the land starting in 1941. By using information on the universe of settlers, we find that the presence of neighbors from the same province origin enhances the likelihood of remaining in the Pontine Marshes until 1941, and eventually buying the land. This effect appears to operate through a productivity channel and exhibits a non-monotonic pattern: if the share of same-origin immigrants exceeds an optimal value, it hinders settlers from benefiting from the diversity of agricultural expertise among neighbors of different origins. However, diversity itself seems to have a detrimental impact on settlers' outcomes. 

ABSTRACT: We study how the supply of anti-consumerism, which can either act as a psychic reward (carrot) for individuals who refrain from buying goods or, in turn, as a psychic cost (stick) paid by the people who carry on consuming goods, affects the outcome of a market where firms are selling horizontally differentiated goods and set their prices strategically. We show that firms' prices, profits, and aggregate production are either unaffected or decreasing under either a relatively low or high level of anti-consumerism. Most importantly, social welfare only improves under a carrot policy and never under a stick approach.  

ABSTRACT: Italy is one of the countries mostly experiencing the fastest and highest population aging in the World. This process is accompanied by decreased spatial heterogeneity in the population's age structure within the country, as evidenced by the spatial convergence of Potential Support Ratios (PSRs, i.e., the ratio of the working-age population to the old-age population). Using municipality-level data drawn from the Italian National Institute of Statistics for 2002-2022 and adopting a variable coefficient beta convergence approach, we first show that the spatial convergence of the PSR was more rapid in the last decade. We also examine the impact of demographic components of population growth on convergence. The results show that the convergence of the old-age component mainly drives the spatial convergence of the PSR. In contrast, the working-age component partially counterbalances the convergence process only in the early ten years. Then, its divergent effect fades over time. Changes in the working-age component are further decomposed into the impact of cohort turnover, net working-age migration, and working-age mortality. Evidence suggests that the internal migration of Italians and the international migration of foreigners have played a leading role in modeling the divergent effect of the working-age component in recent years. The bottom line is that only migration can ensure population stability, slow population decline, and be an indispensable resource for the resilience of social systems. 

ABSTRACT: This paper discusses the use of forecast reconciliation with stock price time series and the corresponding stock index. The individual stock price series may be grouped using known meta-data or other clustering methods. We propose a novel forecasting framework that combines forecast reconciliation and clustering, to lead to better forecasts of both the index and the individual stock price series. The proposed approach is applied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index and its component stocks. The results demonstrate empirically that reconciliation improves forecasts of the stock market index and its constituents.  

ABSTRACT: Even though we live in the golden age of the Internet and social networks, the idiot box remains the primary and undisputed source of political information. At the same time, the production and consumption of videos are becoming ubiquitous (e.g. tik-tok and reels). Currently, television and videos are seldom employed as primary data sources by social scientists utilizing a quantitative approach. This is primarily attributed to the costs and technical challenges inherent in the data collection process, particularly when contrasted with more accessible mediums such as text (e.g., "text-as-data"). In the last couple of years, recent advances in machine learning tools for computer vision and audio analysis have finally paved the way to the possibility of extracting meaningful data from large video archives, at relatively little cost. We show how to apply these tools through a case study involving a web-scraped collection spanning five years (2018-2023) of episodes from two prominent Italian Political Talk Shows (Otto e Mezzo & Stasera Italia) that we match with minute-by-minute TV viewership data from Auditeltm. We provide a descriptive analysis of the trends we find in our case study concerning political representation, topics discussed, and emotional behaviors. 

ABSTRACT: Decentralisation policies are widely used to pursue efficient management of public funds and improved provision of public goods. However, there is limited knowledge regarding the specific conditions that ensure these policies yield positive outcomes. While the existing literature documents the general benefits of decentralisation, there is considerably less understanding of how pre-existing disparities in municipal bureaucratic capacity affect the effectiveness of these policies. We address this gap by examining the constitutional decentralization reform of 2001 in Italy (L.Cost. 3/2001), which significantly enhanced the role of local governments in managing public resources and services. Leveraging a spatial difference-in-discontinuities design and panel data from 2000-2007, our analysis reveals that decentralisation led to an increase in municipal investment spending without resorting to tax rate increases. However, we find that the impact is contingent on local bureaucratic capacity. Only municipalities with high capacity favour the allocation of resources to nursery schools, administrative services, and education and administrative staff. 

ABSTRACT: We study the reaction of national politicians to a rigorous fact-checking of their public statements. Our research design relies on a novel randomized field experiment in collaboration with a leading fact-checking company. Our results show that politicians are responsive to negative fact-checking. We observe a reduction in the number of incorrect statements made by politicians after being treated in the order of one-fourth of a standard deviation. This effect persists for at least two months. We also observe a reduction in the probability of politicians making verifiable statements, suggesting that fact-checking may also increase the ambiguity of politicians' statements.  

ABSTRACT: Health and life expectancy can be influenced by ‘privilege’, namely status related to elite positions in society. We focus on one type of historically rooted privilege namely being a member of the royal family, monarchs, or inherited heads of state and we examine whether it influences age at death compared to similar individuals in their country. We collect extensive demographic and health related records of European Royals and their families during the period for the last three centuries (1750-2000) to study the effect of royal status and period in the throne on age at death. adjusting for relevant controls and confounders. We document three main sets of findings. First, we find a clear gap in age at death between monarchs and members of the royal family and the population of their countries. Second, we find that age at death gaps become narrower or even disappear over the recent decades. Third, comparing the trends across countries reveal a steeper convergence in the 20th century in some countries such as Spain and Belgium, Monaco, the UK, and Sweden compared to Norway, Denmark, and Liechtenstein, where the reduction in the gap follows a linear trend.  These results point to the role of lifestyle improvements alongside technology and universal health insurance in narrowing the health returns to privilege.