Publications

Is remote learning associated with education inequalities? We use PISA 2018 data from five European countries—France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom—to investigate whether education outcomes are related to the possession of the resources needed for distance learning. After controlling for a wide set of covariates, fixed effects, different specifications and testing the stability of coefficients, we find that remote learning is positively associated with average education outcomes, but also with strong and significant education inequalities. Our results show that negative gaps are larger where online schooling is more widespread, across countries, locations, and school types. More generally, remote learning inequalities appear to be associated with technological network externalities: they increase as digital education spreads. Policy makers must guarantee to all students and schools the possession of the resources needed for remote learning, but to reach this goal efficiently they must adapt their actions to the characteristics of countries, areas and school systems.

Does the settling of foreigners cause a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment due to resource competition? Or do direct interactions lead to more respectful relations? And what if one also considers the settlement of foreigners in neighbouring municipalities? Applying an instrumental variable approach to variables collected at the Italian municipality level and including neighbouring areas, this paper aims to answer these questions by considering the vote for the Lega party in 2019 European parliamentary election as a proxy for the anti-immigration sentiment. Our results point out that, once controlling for most socio-economic variables and remoteness, a larger presence of foreigners within the municipality reduces the vote for the Lega. In contrast, the presence of immigrants in the neighbouring municipalities does not show a significant effect. 

This essay analyses the linkages between the inactivity rates and the reading propensity in the Italian regions, over the period 1995-2020. We develop a sectional and temporal analysis. As these two approaches are alternative but complementary to each other, we are able to characterize different facets of this relationship. On average, areas with a low propensity to join the labor market have lower reading propensities. However, this relation is not uniform in all the regions: in the northern regions, usually marked by a lower inactivity rate and a higher reading propensity, emerges a positive relationship in the 25 years under scrutiny. The relationship is different for the southern regions. Within this complex geographical picture, a negative overall trend emerges for both the inactivity and the reading propensity rates. Because in Italy the female inactivity rate is quite high in comparison with other countries, particular attention is also given to the relationship between the reading propensity and the inactivity rates in this segment. Whereas the previous empirical evidence cannot be interpreted in terms of causal relationships, the results offer suggestive support for the inclusion of reading capabilities measures in the broad concept of human capital.

La scommessa di questo lavoro è di indagare come il sistema locale dei servizi sociali abbia reagito all’impatto dei flussi migratori, in un contesto regionale come l’Emilia-Romagna, descrivendo le principali dimensioni intorno alle quali si sono articolati i processi organizzativi nei nove comuni capoluogo. Come cioè sia avvenuta l’integrazione tra i servizi specialistici rivolti a cittadini stranieri e il sistema dei servizi sociali generalisti.

A seguito della riorganizzazione del welfare nazionale, infatti, i modi in cui i servizi si organizzano a livello territoriale è l’esito di due processi convergenti: l’integrazione tra le politiche rilevanti per il benessere dei cittadini e il coordinamento dalla pluralità di attori - istituzionali e non - coinvolti o coinvolgibili nella governance di queste politiche. 

L’indagine copre il periodo della programmazione sociale che va dal 2007 al 2017 e utilizza una base dati composta da interviste semi-strutturate a funzionari comunali e dai documenti amministrativi di natura progettuale e finanziaria. L’elaborazione è stata condotta utilizzando una Cluster Analysis sulla base di variabili ottenute attraverso la Principal Component Analysis.

The COVID-19 pandemic crisis has caused, in addition to the serious effects on the health systems, a sharp slowdown in the Italian and European economy, mainly weighing on the weakest sections of the population with a worrying increase in economic and social inequalities. Using a multidisciplinary approach, this study focuses on the link between socio-economic fragility and epidemic exposure to COVID-19 in Italy and Europe, with a triple objective: to monitor the main dimensions of increased inequalities within the economy and society through an academic literature review; to empirically understand the reasons for national differences in the spread and lethality of the COVID-19 virus at European level; to provide, on the basis of the results obtained in pursuing the previous two objectives, a key to understanding the main public policies for a healthier, more inclusive and sustainable Italy and Europe.

Italy, like other advanced economies, is in the midst of a profound transformation of the production system. At the heart of these processes are two long-term shocks: exposure to competition from emerging and newly industrialized countries and exposure to new digital technologies (ict and robots). Starting from the works of Acemoglu and Restrepo (2017) for the United States and Dauth, Findeisen, Südekum and Woessner (2017) for Germany, an empirical analysis of the impact of digitalization and globalization on the employment dynamics of the Italian local labour markets (sll) is proposed. To this end, a database has been built that unifies the structural data on Istat slls for the period 1991-2011 with data on robots from ifr (International Federation of Robotics). The database integrated the data on investments in ict technologies, provided by eu-klems, the data relating to the trade flows of wits (World Integrated Trade Solution, World Bank) and, lastly, comtrade (un) data. The analysis highlights two results. The first result is that, in the recent history of Italian economic development, the fall in manufacturing employment is due to a much greater extent to competition from emerging and newly industrialized countries compared to the digitization process. The second result is that both in relation to digitization and in relation to globalization the effects on the whole country are far from homogeneous. The effects are spread across the territory according to the different exposure and the different characteristics of the local productive system that suffer the two shocks. In this sense, slls are the necessary tool to understand who wins and who loses.