We study income tax competition in a structure of two adjacent two-tier (federal-regional) fiscal federations, where both upper-tier and lower-tier authorities tax income in the presence of income shifting within and between the federations. We show that when the federations are symmetric, horizontal competition leads to income shifting flows from rich regions (setting higher income tax rates) to poor regions (setting lower tax rates), both within and between federations. Moreover, income-shifting facilities intensify tax competition, potentially increasing income redistribution from wealthier to poorer regions. However, in the asymmetric federations case, the relationship between regional income tax rate and tax base and the resulting direction of inter-regional income shifting flows are ambiguous due to the operation of vertical and diagonal fiscal externalities.

This paper estimates a spatial dynamic panel model on data from the Italian multi-tiered structure of personal income taxation, using distance of lower-tier (municipal) units' neighbors from upper-tier (regional) internal borders interacted with policy variables across those borders as instruments for neighbors' endogenous policy variables. The empirical evidence reveals the existence of an intermunicipal spatial interaction process that is most likely due to information spillovers and points to the role of tax discontinuities at regional borders in the identification of intermunicipal fiscal competition.

Several studies document that exposure to actual immigration affects political outcomes. This paper examines, instead, the influence of expected immigration, using data from local elections in Italy. We develop an index of potential exposure to pre-electoral sea arrivals that varies over time and space depending on immigrants’ nationality. We find that such potential exposure causes a decrease in turnout and increases protest votes, shifting valid votes towards extreme-right parties. Support for populist and anti-immigration parties increased in highly exposed municipalities, where voters believed the new inflow of refugees would increase the local stock of immigrants. However, Twitter data show that these expectations do not reflect actual immigration trends; immigration salience rises mainly during the election period, while most arrivals occur months later. This suggests that, around elections, informal media can bias people’s expectations and, consequently, influence voting behavior.

This paper proposes a novel approach to explore the relation between cultural participation and subjective well-being, and to dig into the relation between the individual and regional dimensions. Using the Italian Multipurpose survey, we derive major cultural consumer profiles that combine the variety and intensity of engagement through latent class analysis. We then investigate how heterogeneity in cultural profiles at the national and regional levels relates to overall life satisfaction and relevant domains (leisure and friendship relationships). The results indicate a positive relation with diversity in consumption becoming more significant in specific domains. At the same time, we find patterns of regional variation in the relation, which is only partly explained by indicators of cultural supply at the regional level. The findings shed light on the role of habits of cultural consumption in individual well-being and inform the policy debate on culture-led interventions.

This paper investigates the impact of the UNESCO World Heritage List (WHL) inscription on income and property values in Italian municipalities with heritage sites inscribed during the past two decades. To address the selection bias and identify the causal impact of inscription, we focus on municipalities having sites included in the national ‘tentative list’ (i.e., a list of candidates for subsequent nomination) and exploit the plausibly exogenous timing of inscription conditional upon being on the list. The evidence from a heterogeneity-robust event study analysis suggests that WHL listing has a significant impact on income and property prices in urban areas. Possible underlying mechanisms are discussed.

An important issue in economic geography is the link between higher education institutions and economic performance at local level. This paper exploits some aspects of the university funding system in Italy to estimate the effects of hosting higher education institutions on local productivity and furthermore tests whether local institutions have a moderating role in this relationship. The findings firstly confirm that university performance positively affects local economies. Secondly, we argue that an important channel linking universities to greater economic activity is the administrative capacity of local governments to create strong social and economic structures.

This paper investigates the efficiency of Italian hospitals and how their performances have changed over the years 2007–2016, characterized by the great economic recession and budget constraints. We apply the Benefit of Doubt (BoD) approach to determine a composite index that considers the multi-dimensionality of the hospital outcome to be used as main output in a metafrontier production function based on a stochastic frontier framework. The efficiency score distribution is then used to construct a Theil index in order to compare, over time, the inequality of the estimated efficiency between hospitals, both within and between regions. The main findings show that the primary source of inefficiency comes from managerial inefficiency especially for hospitals located in southern regions. A clear and persistent North-South gap in efficiency performances of hospitals has been found along with an increase in the inequality in terms of efficiency between the areas of the country mostly determined by between region inequality.

The paper aims to explore the drivers of immigrants’ participation to cultural and leisure activities in host countries. First, we discuss how the main analytical approaches on cultural participation can be extended to incorporate factors specific to migrants’ characteristics and behaviour, namely cultural traits or proximity to the native population’s culture and the level of integration in the host society. Secondly, we estimate zero-inflated ordered probit models to investigate migrants’ propensity and frequency to engage in cultural and leisure activities using data of a special survey on Income and Living conditions (2011–2012) on foreign households in Italy. Italy represents an interesting case because it is a recent immigration country, making the analysis particularly suitable for studying the behaviour of first-generation immigrants. Our findings suggest that, after controlling for standard individual predictors, cultural participation is significantly and primary driven by the process of acculturation which take place during the staying in the host country. Conversely, we find only a partial or weak evidence of the effect of both personal cultural capital and of the heterogeneity in migrants’ cultural traits on variation in participation rates.

Universities have become key elements in building regional innovation systems. However, even though academic research is important when firms choose universities as collaboration partners, a still open question in the literature is whether only top-tier universities are relevant for firm innovativeness. This paper investigates the effect of the volume of scientific publications on firm’s propensity to develop new product and processes and to what extent academic research has to be excellent in order to enhance local industrial innovation, taking into account that education may act as a channel of local university-based knowledge spillovers. Using data on manufacturing firms in seven European countries covering the period 2007–2009, a multivariate probit model is estimated to relate firm’s propensity to develop innovation to the level of provincial academic research and education. Results show that academic research has a direct impact on the firm’s propensity to develop innovation. Research at the second-tier university impacts product innovation more than that at first-tier one. Furthermore, the research output of the first-tier university exerts a detrimental effect on the development of process innovation whereas the research output of third- and lower-tier universities is beneficial. Research excellence, although very important, is not sufficient to explain university-based knowledge spillovers. It may be the case that academic research may enhance radical innovation of relatively few firms working on cutting-edge research, whereas less advanced academic research may be directly useful to incremental innovation of most local firms.

Acknowledging childhood as a crucial period for the formation of social preferences, we investigate whether the order of birth predicts trust in adult life. We find that laterborns trust on average 5% less than their older siblings, independently from personality traits, family ties, risk aversion and parental inputs. Family random- and fixed-effects estimates suggest that the variation in trust is mostly explained by within- rather than between-family characteristics. The effect of birth order is mediated by education outcomes only for women, while it is moderated by mother’s education for the entire sample, thereby leading to relevant policy implications.

Using a survey on Italian graduates, we investigate whether universities' degree production affects the economic development of the regions where academic institutions are located. To deal with suspected endogeneity between human capital development and economic growth, we employ an instrumental variable approach, using a global lump sum transferred to each university as an instrument for human capital production. Once we control for the regional flow of mobile students and graduates, the findings reveal the beneficial effect of the university system on local economic development through the gain in human capital.

The paper aims to determine whether the distribution of funds that prizes the best-performing institutions relatively more has the effect of replicating the Matthew effect within them in terms of personnel policies and allocating proportionally more resources to the best departments to strengthen their output considering the prospect of future assessments. Data from the Italian public university system between 2011 and 2016 as well as the outcomes of the national evaluation of research produced between 2004 and 2010 and between 2011 and 2014 in 14 disciplinary research areas are used. The empirical evidence shows that Italian universities have tended to increase their specialisation in the research areas in which they ranked below or slightly above the national mean, revealing that they chose to try to strengthen the weak sectors through both promotions and new recruitments. The results suggest the existence of a dual policy. When the Ministry of Education, University and Research tries to foster a Matthew effect mechanism, allocating more resources to the best-performing universities, the latter seem to opt to implement a beauty contest strategy to make their weak areas converge towards the national mean. When considering the effects of the recruiting strategies following the national evaluation of research, the results indicate the existence of some Matthew effects, showing that increasing specialisation is more fruitful for the best than for the worst universities.

This paper investigates the influence of the staggered schedule of Italian mayoral elections and of the calendar of traditional religious celebrations (Patron Saint Days) on the timing of fiscal decisions and on the selection of candidates. We find that potentially disruptive local income tax increases are more likely to be taken after local elections and Patron Saint Days. Moreover, when the elections take place during the weeks leading to Patron Saint Day’s traditional celebrations, the elected mayors tend to exhibit milder ideology and higher indicators of valence, reinforcing the hypothesis that local folklore contributes to increasing the sense of community and lowering the ideological stakes of local races.

We test whether there is a link between the performance of universities, measured through a concept of efficiency, and the economic development of the regions in which they operate. Indicators of teaching, research, and third mission are considered as outputs. To handle endogeneity problems between the efficiency of universities and economic development, a system generalized method of moments and then an instrumental variable approach are used. Our findings reveal that the presence of efficient universities fosters local economic development. Knowledge spillovers occur to areas that are in close geographical proximity to efficient universities. Results are robust to different estimation strategies.

This paper studies whether high-quality research in first-tier universities has greater local knowledge spillovers than that in lower-tier universities. First-tier universities are identified as those among the top 150, according to the Academic Ranking of World Universities. Several indicators of academic excellence are included among the contextual drivers of innovation in a multivariate probit regression applied to European manufacturing data. The results show that top-10 publications of second-tier universities exhibit the highest positive association with product innovation of science-based sectors, but negative associations with top-10 publications of first- and second-tier universities are evidenced for process innovation in this macro-sector.

In the National Innovation System (NIS), knowledge is produced and accumulated through interactive innovation processes that are embedded in a national context, which in turn may help determine innovation. This paper investigates how product and process innovations in the European food and drink industry are affected by: (i) NIS structure; (ii) NIS output in terms of scientific publications and the supply of graduates; (iii) NIS cohesion and coordination; (iv) NIS scientific impact and specialisation. The main source of data on innovation by firms is the EU-EFIGE/Bruegel-UniCredit dataset. This is supplemented by information from the International Handbook of Universities, Eurostat and a bibliometric analysis of academic research output. Our results suggest that large research institutions in the public sector may well be detrimental to interaction between university and industry and to process innovation. The indicators used for public research assessment are not necessarily the most appropriate proxies of local knowledge spillovers.

In this article, we test whether economic growth depends on human capital development mainly operating through an upgrading of human capital stock in the area where the universities are located. We specify a growth model where a qualitative measure of human capital development, university efficiency, is considered in conjunction with a customary quantitative measure of human capital development, number of graduates. The model is estimated on panel data over the period 2003 to 2011. The evidence suggests that both indicators of human capital development have a positive and significant impact on gross domestic product per capita. Results also show that knowledge spillovers occur between areas through the geographical proximity to the efficient universities, suggesting that the geography of production is affected. Results hold when robustness checks are performed.

Using a difference-in-differences approach, we exploit a quasi experiment occurred in a large public university located in southern Italy to examine whether the introduction of a selective admission test affects students’ performances. Our analysis on this unique data set shows that a change of regime to a restrictive admission policy reduces the drop-out rate of first-year students by about 14 percentage points, increasing their grade point average (GPA) by 0.78 point. In addition to the increase in average quality of admitted students, our results suggest that positive effects of an admission policy change largely operate through the impact of a better quality of social interactions at class level on the average individual performances. Results are robust to several checks. Compared with other studies using a similar approach, our own provides evidence that selective admission policies can induce different educational outcomes in diverse geographic areas of the same national system of higher education.