Work in progress
Work in progress
Using a large administrative dataset, we study the long-term career paths and pension contribution accumulation of the Italian workers fully covered by the Notional Defined Contribution (NDC) system since its introduction in 1996. We track the work intensity and the contribution accumulation of the cohorts entering the labour market between 1996 and 2011, and compare them with a continuously employed, median-wage benchmark. We document the average trajectories, the incidence of poor careers, and inequality, also by sex, contract type, and geographic area of birth. We find persistent and increasing career instability, especially among women and workers born in the South, and a substantial work intensity and capital accumulation gap for younger cohorts with high risk of inadequate future pensions. Complementing the analysis with simulations on GDP growth, wages, and employment risks, we document a primary role for macroeconomic factors and work intensity in driving the contribution gap dynamics.
Measures of income polarization are motivated as quantifying conflict potential in a society. The key premise is that individuals share a feeling of “group identity” with people with similar income and feel “alienated” from people distant in income. The group identity element makes the concept of polarization distinct from the concept of inequality. Existing measures of polarization assume static societies. We argue that this is unsatisfactory and propose a measure that is sensitive to the dynamics of income over time. This inter-temporal income polarization measure introduces memory parameters that allow past income differences to determine the degree of current alienation and identification in a society. This leads to measures that are sensitive to the history of interpersonal proximity and distances in income trajectories. We illustrate the empirical relevance of this perspective with an application based on administrative data on labour income of several Italian cohorts. Estimates of polarization decline dramatically once the history of proximity is taken into account. This suggests that the level of polarization we measure in a snapshot of the distribution may not reflect actual polarization process if the latter is based on durable bonds.
This paper examines the distributional effects of tax incentives aimed at attracting high-skilled foreigners and returning expatriates to Italy. While a large literature shows that high-skilled migration is responsive to taxation, much less is known about how preferential tax schemes affect income inequality, tax progressivity, and horizontal equity. We address this gap by evaluating the Italian preferential tax regime over the period 2016–2022. Using EU-SILC microdata, administrative tabulations from the Ministry of Economy and Finance, and official migration statistics, we build a static tax-benefit microsimulation framework to estimate counterfactual income distributions in the absence of the policy. We assess the impact of the scheme on a broad set of pre- and post-tax inequality measures, including the Gini coefficient, Generalized Entropy indices, top income shares, and percentile ratios. Our analysis provides new evidence on the trade-off between efficiency and equity in tax policies designed to attract mobile talent.
This thesis stems from research work I carried out in various universities and institutions to provide new perspectives on the analysis of mobility in different research contexts. The first two chapters deal with earnings mobility and its association with inequality (Chapter 1) and polarization (Chapter 2), while the third chapter is concerned with geographical mobility in response to labour market shocks (Chapter 3). In all three cases, the focus of the analysis is on the Italian labour market. However, while the first and last works are applied in nature, the second one is a theoretical paper whose application is instrumental to understanding the theory and demonstrating its empirical relevance.