Vincenzo Scrutinio

Work in Progress

Managerial Input and Firm Performance. Evidence from a Policy Experiment (with Francesco Manaresi, Alessandro Palma and Luca Salavatici) - link

Many small firms lack the managerial competences needed for growth. Consultancy could provide them with such skills, but market and behavioral frictions can prevent firms to use these services. We study whether subsidizing consultancy can boost firm performance by analyzing a subsidy program in Italy that granted firms a small monetary contribution to acquire consultancy services for export. The subsidy was assigned through an online application process based on a first-come, first-served rule. We identify the causal impact of the policy by comparing firms that nearly got the subsidy and firms that nearly missed the subsidy due to small differences in their time of application in a difference-in-differences framework. We find that the firms receiving the subsidy increased their exports towards countries outside the European Union (+13%), revenues (+10.5%), labor productivity (+9.6%), profits (+55%), and size (+14%) after three years since the policy implementation. Interviews with consultants show that initial contract generated a long-term relationship between the service provider and the beneficiary firm and that consultants also provided other services, such as support for digitalization.

Friday Morning Fever. Evidence from a randomized experiment on Sick Leave Monitoring in the Public Sector (with Tito Boeri, Edoardo Di Porto and Paolo Naticchioni) - link

Under Revision

Absent providers of key public services, such as schooling and health, are a major problem in both developed and developing countries. This paper offers the first analysis of a population-wide controlled field experiment for home visits checking on sick leave in the public sector. We planned and performed the experiment in Italy, a country with large absenteeism in the public sector. We exploit unique administrative data from the Italian social security administration (INPS) on sick leave claims and monitoring as well as on work histories. We find that receiving a home visit reduces the number of days on sick leave in the following 16 months by about 8% (3.3 days). The effect is stronger for workers who are found irregularly on sick leave (-7.9 days) and for certificates beginning and ending in proximity of week-ends. We interpret our findings as a deterrence effect of home visits on opportunistic behavior: workers being found irregularly on sick leave experience a decline of about 1.4% of their wage in the following 16 months. Uncertainty aversion (there is no automatism in these sanctions) can also play a role in these results. Our estimates suggest that home visits are cost-effective: every Euro spent for the visits involves up to 5 Euros reductions in sick benefit outlays. We estimate the marginal value of public funds (MVPF) spent on home visits at about 1.25, which is significantly lower than estimates of MVPF of income taxes in the US.

For a few Euro more: Benefit Generosity and the Optimal Path of Unemployment Benefits (with Anna D'Ambrosio) - link

In this paper, we exploit the provision of higher UB at different points of the unemployment spell to shed light on the relative cost of insurance earlier or later in the spell. First, we exploit the double cap system in an RDD setting to study the effect of higher benefit levels on time on benefits and non-employment. We find that higher benefits increase the time spent on benefits and in non-employment, with no impact on new job quality. Second, we exploit an age-based discontinuity in benefit duration, which provides benefits later in the spell, to compare the behavioural and mechanical costs of increasing benefit levels or benefit duration. We find that the moral hazard costs are greater for benefit levels. In addition, we provide evidence of a slight negative selection in long term unemployment. We argue that the long-term unemployed face higher uncertainty in their employment prospects. These findings suggest that higher benefits later in the unemployment spell generate lower costs and would provide higher insurance. Our results question the optimality of strongly declining schedules for unemployment benefit generosity.

Manipulation, Selection and the Design of Targeted Social Insurance (with Luca Citino and Kilian Russ)  -  most recent version link

This paper provides a sufficient statistics framework to study the design of optimal targeted social insurance in the presence of manipulation opportunities, through which individuals select into policies not intended for them. We apply our framework to Italian unemployment insurance (UI), which features a discontinuous increase in maximum benefit duration around an age-at-layoff threshold. Using novel bunching techniques, we document pervasive manipulation and a substantial increase in benefit receipts by individuals who self-select into longer benefit duration. However, most of this increase is mechanically due to higher coverage, while the moral hazard response is modest. We connect these findings to our theory and discuss how they affect welfare conclusions.

Colocation and Knowledge Diffusion: Evidence from Million Dollar Plants (with Christian Fons-Rosen and Katalin Szemeredi) – Cep Discussion Paper n. 1447 - link

This paper uses the entry of large corporations into U.S. counties during the 1980s and 1990s to analyze the effect of plant opening on local innovation activity. We use a difference-in-differences identification strategy exploiting information on the revealed ranking of possible locations for large plants. Under the identifying assumption that locations not chosen (losers) are a counterfactual for the chosen location (winner), we have two main empirical findings. First, patents of these large corporations are 82% more likely to be cited in the winning counties relative to the losing counties after entry. The increase in citations is stronger for more recent patents whereas patent quality does not seem to play an important role. Second, patenting by incumbent inventors in the winning county increases after the entry announcement by 10% with respect to patenting by incumbents in losing counties. An additional effect on patent quality is present when these large entering corporations are have a history of intensive patenting activity. One can infer from these findings that geographical proximity increases knowledge diffusion and that local inventors benefit from the entry of top corporations into their county.

The Medium-Term Effects of Unemployment Benefits - WorkINPS paper n. 18 - Most recent version: link

Although there is an extensive literature on the short-term effects of unemployment benefits, little is known about their medium-term implications. In this paper I use rich and novel administrative data to study the effects of potential benefit duration on aggregate outcomes over 4 years after layoff. I implement a regression discontinuity design exploiting a discontinuous 4 months jump in potential benefit duration at 50 years of age-at-layoff. I find that longer potential benefit duration leads to a longer period on unemployment benefits and in not employment, by 8 weeks and 6.2 weeks respectively. I also find positive, but small and often not significant, effects on first job quality with a small increase in the probability of finding a permanent contract. In the medium run, however, workers with longer potential benefit duration spend only 2 additional weeks in not employment and show small labor income losses. This is driven by a higher employment probability in the period following the first reemployment, which compensate for the longer time spent to find a job. Estimates are robust to a wide set of robustness checks and a placebo check further supports my identification strategy. Results suggest that workers coming from smaller firms and losing a permanent contract are the ones most negatively affected by longer potential benefit duration. These findings are important from a policy perspective as they suggest that classical measures of the cost of unemployment benefits tend to overestimate the negative externalities of potential benefit duration.

RESEARCH IN PROGRESS:

Middle Leaders' Training and School Performance: Evidence from a Programme Intervention in UK (with Shqiponja Telhaj and Katy Theobald)

Published Papers

Lockdown, Essential Sectors, and Covid-19: Lessons from Italy (with Edoardo di Porto and Paolo Naticchioni) - Journal of Health Economics (2022) - link

This paper investigates how economic activity impacted Covid-19 infections and all-cause mortality. To this purpose, we exploit the distribution of essential sectors, which were exempted from a national lockdown enacted in Italy during the first wave of the pandemic, across provinces and rich administrative data in a difference-in-differences framework. We find that a standard deviation increase in essential workers per built square kilometre leads to 1.1 additional daily cases and 0.32 additional daily deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. Back of the envelope calculations suggest that about one third (47,000) of the Covid-19 cases and about 13% (13,000) of deaths between March and May of 2020 can be attributed to the less stringent lockdown for these sectors. The effect is heterogeneous across sectors. Finally, we find that the local health system played a relevant role in reducing fatalities with a higher number of general practitioners and hospital beds per capita being associated with a lower mortality. 

Teacher Turnover: Does it Matter for Pupil Achievement? (with Steve Gibbons and Shqiponja Telhaj) - Labour Economics (2021) - link

Abstract: This paper contributes to the understanding of the causal relationship between teacher turnover and student performance. We extend this research by examining the mechanisms through which turnover affects student learning, and by providing evidence on how schools respond to mitigate the disruptive effects of turnover. Using administrative data covering all state-school, age-16 students and their teachers in England, we find that a higher teacher entry rate has a small but significant negative effect on students’ final qualifications from compulsory-age schooling. This is the first study to document that the lack of school-specific human capital in incoming teachers is the main mechanism through which turnover disrupts student performance. We also find evidence that schools mitigate the effects of turnover by assigning new teachers away from high-risk student grades.

Potential impact of gradual reduction of fat content in manufactured and out-of-home food on obesity in the United Kingdom: a modeling study (with Roberta Alessandrini, Feng J He, Yuan Ma, David S Wald, Graham A MacGregor ) - The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (2021) - link

Background: Manufactured and out-of-home foods contribute to excessive calories and have a critical role in fueling the obesity epidemic. We propose a 20% fat reduction in these foods.

Objectives: To evaluate the potential impact of the proposed strategy on energy intake, obesity and related health outcomes in the population.

Methods: We used the National Diet and Nutrition Survey rolling program (NDNS RP) data to calculate fat and energy contributions from 46 manufactured and out-of-home food categories. We considered a gradual fat reduction-focusing on SFA-in these categories to achieve a 20% reduction in 5 years. We estimated the reduction in energy intake in the NDNS RP population and predicted the body weight reduction using a weight loss model. We scaled up the body weight reduction to the UK adult population. We estimated reductions in overweight/obesity and type 2 diabetes cases. We calculated the reductions of LDL, ischemic heart disease (IHD), and stroke deaths that could be prevented from the SFA reduction.

Results: The selected categories contributed to 38.6% of the population's energy intake. By the end of the fifth year, our proposed strategy would reduce the mean energy intake by 67.6 kcal/d/person (95% CI: 66.1-68.8). The energy reduction would reduce the mean body weight by 2.7 kg (95% CI: 2.6-2.8). The obesity prevalence would be reduced by 5.3% and the overweight prevalence by 1.5%, corresponding to 3.5 and 1 million cases of obesity and overweight, respectively, being reduced in the United Kingdom. The body weight reduction could prevent 183,000 (95% CI: 171,000-194,000) cases of type 2 diabetes over 2 decades. Energy from SFA would fall by 2.6%, lowering LDL by 0.13 mmol/L and preventing 87,560 IHD deaths (95% CI: 82,260-112,760) and 9520 stroke deaths (95% CI: 4400-14,660) over 20 years.

Conclusions: A modest fat reduction (particularly in SFA) in widely consumed foods would prevent obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.

Future Research:

Compensating Differentials in the Public Sector (with Esteban Aucejo and Shqiponja Telhaj)