ABSTRACT: The seminar is aimed at presenting some preliminary results on the vitality expressed by music teachers in the context of music schools in Trentino (mainly cooperative firms and associations). We use an original survey that includes about 60% of the teacher population (N=140). Vitality is defined as the ability to carry out creative, self-actualising actions or activities for oneself and with others. Empirically, we have observed it: a) through the nature of the activities carried out in the school and the creativity associated with them by the teachers, b) through satisfaction with one's own personal fulfillment - assuming that this also includes an assessment of the state of well-being of the other members of the school. For an initial, exploratory analysis of the determinants of vitality in the school context, we consider elements of job satisfaction, entry motivation, participation in decision-making, and meaning attributed to working in the school. We present a description of these variables and models. Early results indicate that personal fulfillment, as an indicator of vitality, emphasises collective and other regarding predictors more than when vitality is understood as individual creative capability.

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.