research

photos from kathmandu, namche bazaar, and from close to tengboché in the solu khumbu valley (nepal);

1. I paradisi fiscali e le norme di contrasto: fra convenzioni OCSE, direttive comunitarie e norme di diritto interno 

ABSTRACT:  Analizzo, basandomi principalmente sul testo di Giuseppe Marino, EGEA (2009), il fenomeno dei paradisi fiscali, e mi pongo dal punto di vista dello stato italiano, per evitare che persone fisiche e società vi ricorrano; rivedo i principali strumenti giuridici, come la controlled foreign corporation del TUIR, per ridurre il ricorso ai paradisi fiscali, nonché discuto di alcuni contributi economici come Dharmapala (2008), Gravelle (2009), Nicodeme (2009), e Slemrod e Wilson (2006) per spiegare l'esistenza di questo genere di paesi; rivedo anche temi come quelli del riciclaggio di denaro sporco, e dei paradisi penali, oltre che fiscali;

NOTE: MARCH 2010 - tale lavoro costituisce la tesi conclusiva del corso di laurea triennale in economia e professione presso l'Università di Bologna (sett. 2006 - marzo 2010), svolta sotto la supervisione di Silvia Giannini, discussa con Antonio Matacena, Dario Spelta, e la stessa Silvia Giannini, il 30 marzo 2010;

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2. The Israeli practice of targeted killings

ABSTRACT: this short paper discusses the israeli practice of targeted killings, operated towards (prsumed) palestinian terrorists, and their families; it reviews the applicable international humanitarian law, and some issuances of the israeli supreme court, also by judge Aharon Barak; it also presents some other violations of human rights and civil liberties of palestinians, such as the operation defensive wall;

NOTE: FEBRUARY 2013 - paper submitted as an approfondimento for the course in *Civil Liberties and Human Rights* within the corso di laurea magistrale in discipline economiche e sociali at Università Bocconi wit- Graziella Romeo;

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 3. Fiscal multipliers in the euro area: evidence from Southern European regions

ABSTRACT:  An original panel data set of exogenous fiscal shocks for some Mediterranean countries is used along with a so-called "narrative" approach introduced by Romer and Romer (2010), to estimate the tax multiplier. Exogenous shocks comprise only tax changes motivated by the willingness to improve long term growth, reduce government debt as well as achieving redistributive goals. Endogenous shocks are excluded from the data, since they are likely to be correlated with output.  The aggregate tax multiplier on output is much smaller than the one found in Romer and Romer (2010): -1, instead of -3 at a three years perspective. When considering the effect of tax changes on unemployment, a multiplier of +2.8 is found on a two years horizon; a similar coefficient, with a negative sign, is found relating government tax revenues with private investment, on the same temporal horizon. Splitting the sample between pre and post-financial crisis period, a multiplier non significantly different than zero is obtained for the first partition, while significant and equal to -0.75 for the second subsample;

NOTE: FEBRUARY 2013 - Such paper constitutes a revised version of the author's final thesis aimed at obtaining the studying title of dottore magistrale within the course in Discipline economiche e sociali at Università Bocconi in Milan. Supervision was provided by Francesco Giavazzi. Advisor was Luca Sala. Discussants were Alberto Alesina, Carlo Favero and Tommaso Nannicini. Matteo Salto, at the European Commission, thankfully provided us with the European Union wide set of data used in the analysis throughout the paper. All errors and imprecisions remain ours;

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4. A new Keynesian model of government spending across US regions

ABSTRACT: We attempt to replicate the New-Keynesian DSGE model presented in Nakamura and Steinssòn (2014), in order to study the effects of a government spending shock on output, and other prominent macro-economic variables, within a simplified two-region monetary union. Two different specifications for the utility function (separable and non-separable in leisure and consumption, à la Greenwood, Hercowitz, and Huffman 1988) are adopted. Perfectly flexible capital markets detained by households are introduced at a regional level first, and then firm specific capital is assumed. After calibrating for the structural parameters, the model is linearly approximated around the steady states, and impulse response functions are derived and commented, through the program DYNARE;

NOTE: FEBRUARY 2015 - Paper submitted as part of the evaluation of the course in Graduate Macroeconomics III, taught by Raf Wouters at ECARES - Université libre de Bruxelles. We acknowledge previous comments in end of 2012 from Francesco Giavazzi, as well as some exchanges on the software with Francesco Giovanardi;

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5. Students admission to Italian medical schools

ABSTRACT: We adopt a static game of incomplete information (Bayesian) to account for italian students willing to apply to a medical school. The features allow us to obtain an outcome which is sub-optimal, similarly to what happened in practice every year. In particular, a waste of talents is likely to occur as far as students may apply to one school only, and perform a standardized test whose validity holds just for that very specific school. Reforms based on a unique ranking are compared with this system as well as other types of selection not based on standardized tests;

NOTE: DECEMBER 2014 - Paper written as part of the course in Graduate Microeconomics III, taught by Georg Kirchsteiger, within the PhD program in Quantitative Economics at ECARES - Université libre de Bruxelles, in the fall of 2014. Inspiration for the paper's idea is partially acknowledged to Enrico Cantoni;

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6. Dynamic optimization lecture notes

ABSTRACT: the topics covered are static optimization, the khun - tucker theorems, some linear algebra, such as the bordered hessian matrix; some integrals and integration techniques; the envelope theorem; some methods to solve some types of differential equations, such as the separable variables ones, the Bernoulli ones, the exact ones, and the nearly exact ones; and some issues in dynamic optimization, such as calculus of variations (euler - lagrange equations), and optimal control theory (hamiltonians) for economic applications;

NOTE: SPRING 2015 - notes written down in latex during the lectures of the course in Dynamic Optimization, the during the second year of the PhD programme in quantitative economics at ECARES - ULB, taught by Germain Van Bever and Yves Dominicy, who based their lectures on the notes of Marjorie Gassner;

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7. Summaries on environmental economics

ABSTRACT: These summaries review the following papers: *The Problem of Social Costs* of Ronald Coase, appeared in the Journal of Law and Economics in 1960; *Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems* of Elinor Ostrom, appeared in the American Economic Review in 2010; *on Behavioural Environmental Economics* of Jason F. Shogren and Laura O. Taylor, appeared in the Review of Economics and Policy in 2008; *Quasi - Experimental and Experimental Approaches to Environmental Economics* of Michael Greenstone and Ted Gayer, appeared in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management in 2008; *The Value of Regulatory Discretion: Estimates from Environmental Inspections in India* of Esther Duflo, Michael Greenstone, Rohini Pande, and Nicholas Ryan, appeared at that moment in the Harvard Environmental Economics Program discussion papers series, later appered in Econometrica, in november 2018; and *The Short and Long Run Effects of Behavioural Interventions: Experimental Evidence from Energy Conservation* of Hunt Allcott and Todd Rogers, appeared in the American Economic Review in 2014;

NOTE: NOVEMBER 2015 - Paper written as part of the evaluation of the course in Environmental Economics, during the third year of the PhD programme in quantitative economics at ECARES - Université libre de Bruxelles, course held by Estelle Cantillon;

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8. Survival analysis notes

ABSTRACT: These notes resume for the sake of my understanding the type of statistical analysis known as survival analysis, applied mainly to demography, or duration analysis, applied to econometrics; I wrote these notes as a preparatory study for the MRes thesis in development economics and demography with Philip Verwimp of ECARES - Université libre de Bruxelles, and Gudrun Østby of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, and they are based on the chapters 17, 18, and 19 of the Cameron and Trivedi (2005) handbook on micro-econometrics; they deal with partial likelihood, proportional hazards models, accelerated failure time models, and, in general, with the analysis of censored data for sociological and demographic applications;

NOTE: SPRING 2015 - I wrote them in the buidling H of the Solbosch campus of the Université libre de Bruxelles in the MRes students office, with Lorenzo Tondi, Guido Giorgio Bodrato, Marco Luca Pinchetti, Tillmann Heidelk, Anousheh Alamir, Sarah Rosenberg, and Alex Roth;

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10. Summary of Bhalotra and Van Soest (2008)

ABSTRACT: This note resumes the Journal of Econometrics paper of Sonia Bhalotra and Arthur Van Soest (2008) on neonatal mortality, frailty, and fecundity in India, based on an analysis of some survey data, spanning thirty years of fertility histories; the paper deals with issues such as birth spaces, and unobserved heterogeneity in mothers' preferences for parities, and child care attitudes; the note also contains a short review of some stochastic processes, such as homogeneous markov chains, as based on the course in Stochastic Models taught by. Thomas Verdebout in the spring term of the second year of the PhD programme in quantitative economics at ECARES - Université libre de Bruxelles, namely in a.y. 2014/'15, in the Campus de la Plaine;

NOTE: SPRING 2015 - the note was useful to me to understand which statistical model to apply to the MRes final thesis on Burundian fertility during civil war, for the joint project with Philip Verwimp and Gudrun Østby, which is described below, in the corresponding publication;

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11. Forced displacement, migration and fertility in Burundi

with Philip Verwimp and Gudrun Østby, appeared in Population and Development Review in April 2020

ABSTRACT: The civil war in Burundi (1993–2005) led to the forced displacement of a large part of the population. This study aims to explore how that displacement affected fertility behavior. Using a nationally representative, retrospective survey on birth and residential histories of 4,523 Burundian women, we examine the impact of conflict ‐ induced displacement on fertility. These unique data enable us to distinguish between remaining‐in‐place, voluntary migration, and forced displacement, as well as to distinguish between periods spent “on the move” versus periods spent in residence in the new site. Adopting a semi-parametric regression model, we analyze both the probability of the first pregnancy, and the subsequent spacing of higher order pregnancies. We find that the risk of a first pregnancy was higher in the year in which a woman was forcibly displaced, and lower in the year a woman migrated voluntarily. Residency in a new site increased the risk of pregnancy for both;

NOTE: APRIL 2020 - We thank the audience at the PRIO Workshop "Armed conflict, maternal and child health, and the impact of development aid in sub‐Saharan Africa" in Oslo in September 2016, Eliana La Ferrara, Bram de Rock, and the participants of the Quetelet Conference held at the Université catholique de Louvain on November 29/30, 2017. The comments of the referees and the editor allowed us to improve the manuscript substantially. All errors remain the responsibility of the authors only;

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12. Micro-economic theory: general equilibrium

ABSTRACT: This note surveys for the sake of my understading some issues in general equilibrium theory from the book *Micro-economic Theory* of Andreu Mas-Colell, Michael D. Whinston, and Jerry R. Green (1995), on preference relations, the positive theory of equilibrium, walrasian equilibrium, convex technologies, the index theorem, anything goes, the sonnescheim-mantel-debreu theorem, asset pricing, sequential trade, asset markets, firm behaviour in general equilibrium models under uncertainty, imperfect information, spot markets, rational expectation equilibrium, equilibrium and time, the ramsey - solow model, the cost of adjustment model, the computation of equilibrium and derivation of euler equations, the cost of adjustment technology, policy and value functions, hints on dynamic programming, stationary paths, interest rates and golden rules, and, finally, the sketch of a regression discontinuity design, to evaluate the differential effect on revenues of the registration of a trademark for the company at hand in various countries;

NOTE: NOVEMBER 2020 - This work is part of a consulting project within my job of certified public accountant in Bologna, Italy, where i was supposed to carry out an appraisal of a trademark of a small mechanical company in Pontecchio Marconi (BO) (Tecnologie FRB srl), since the italian law gave the chance to companies to re-evaluate their intangible assets in the financial reports;

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13. Returns to scale with a Cobb-Douglas production function for four small northern italian firms

ABSTRACT: I study the effects of fixed and variable costs on revenues for four firms operating in the sectors of lathing and milling, packaging machines construction, mechanical components production, and shoe parts building, all four in the neighbourhood of Bologna, Italy; I estimate a linear simultaneous equation model, where variable and fixed costs explain revenues, with a sample of eleven/twelve years of data for each firm; overall, I find that a marginal increase in variable costs led to slightly higher than proportional increases in revenues on impact; similarly for fixed costs; in addition to that, I estimate various Cobb-Douglas production functions, with capital, labour, and raw materials as inputs on revenues, to find out whether the returns to scale have been increasing, constant, or decreasing, for each single firm individually, for the sample at hand, and for the whole four firms together in a joint panel data set; I adopt various estimation methods, OLS, instrumental variables (lagged inputs), dynamic panel data methods, and the Levinsohn and Petrin 2003 method; overall, I find support for the hypothesis of slightly decreasing returns to scale, except for the women's shoes' heels company;

NOTE: FEBRUARY 2023 - The present article is the translation in English, and in a research framework, of a consulting project carried out as part of the job of certified public accountant I am currently involved in in Bologna, Italy, on the estimation of the returns to scale of the four client firms; I thank Francesco Giovanardi, Denni Tommasi, Luca Sala, Federico Rossi, Bram De Rock, and Cristina Boari for insightful comments;

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14. Replication of José Luis Cruz and Esteban Rossi - Hansberg 2023

ABSTRACT: Esteban Rossi- Hansberg was invited from IGIER - Bocconi to present this joint work with José Luis Cruz on the economic geography of global warming, in october 2023, based on a spatial dynamic integrated assessment model of climate change, which featured the various representative concentration pathways (RCPs) of pollutants' emissions and the consequent temperature and productivity responses, based on some reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); I didn't make it to go to Milan to follow the seminar that day, therefore, I decided to replicate the paper, thanks to the replication codes present on the personal websites of the authors - thanks to their email assistance, I managed to replicate the article's main figures through STATA and MATLAB, and to publish the world maps and impulse response functions on variations of emissions on productivity, amenities, energy prices, and global temperatures on my instagram page (devidosti); I didn't write a note to comment the paper, since it was a relatively new topic to me, and just learnt from them, and from the replication exercise;

NOTE: JANUARY 2024 - The replication took me several weeks, given that the STATA and MATLAB codes should have run for several days on the computer, and the electricity connection in my practice was jumping, therefore, I had to bring the pc at home, to be able to have the electrical continuity to run the codes properly;

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15. Latin american politics and societies, remote work and city structure, cartographie radicale

ABSTRACT: I resumed three pieces of research: *The Inclusionary Term in Latin American Democracies* of Diana Kapiszewski of the Georgetown University, Steven Levitsky of Harvard University, and Deborah J. Yashar of Princeton University, appeared with the Cambridge University Press 2021; *Remote Work and City Structure* of Esteban-Rossi Hansberg, Ferdinando Monte, and Charlie Porcher, NBER working paper of 2023 on US cities and remote work during the corona - virus disease, which uses whatsapp data to track people on their trip to the central business districts of the main US cities; and finally *Cartographie Radicale: Explorations* of Nepthys Zwer and Philippe Rekacewicz, ed. la Découverte, Paris, 2020, on the sanctuarization of the northern world, Europe and North America, and the threat the police and military pose in these bordering areas to immigrants from the southern and eastern world, namely South America, Africa, and Asia;

NOTE: SPRING 2024 - The first and the third piece of research surveyed were borrowed from the Biblioteca Amilcar Cabral in Bologna, Via San Mamolo 24; the second, I found it online; 

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16. Climate change economics

ABSTRACT: I summarize some articles on the global macroeconomy and climate change, mainly revolving around the work of William D. Nordhaus, and his dynamic integrated climate economy model (DICE) of 1992 and subsequent updates, as well as other integrated assessment models of other researchers, such as Valentina Bosetti, studying some pollution reduction trajectories, to avoid exceeding the 1.5/2°C temperature threshold above pre-industrial levels, set out in the Paris Accords in november 2015; I also review some papers on carbon dioxide emissions, the disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet, dynamic climate clubs, the sustainable development goals, and, in general the sustainability agenda of the UN horizon 2030;

NOTE: SPRING 2025 - I began to work on the paper in preview of a likely presentation at the European Winter Meeting of the Econometric Society, whcih has been held in Palma de Maiorca in december 2024, but not accepted for the conference; I went to the conference anyways, as part of the audience; and secondly for the SEBOL conference in Bolivia to be held in july/august 202;