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ABSTRACT Evidence suggests that the significantly higher life expectancy levels witnessed over the past centuries are associated with a lower concentration of survival times, both cross-country and over time. The purpose of this work is to study the relationships that exist among models for the evolution of survival distributions, longevity measures, and concentration. We first study relationships between concentration and cohort longevity through empirical comparisons. We then propose a family of survival models that can be used to capture such trends in longevity and concentration across survival distributions.

The aim of this paper is to study whether politicians manipulate fiscal policy to extract private rents. We focus on the local personal income tax (PIT), in the setting of Italian cities, which is a progressive instrument that allows mayors to set different rates to distinct wage groups. We exploit discontinuities in mayors’ salaries, that are based on population thresholds, to study whether mayors systematically apply lower rates to their own tax bracket. The main results document large rent-seeking activity in fiscal policy. First, we show that when mayors’s salary is exogenously located in the following tax bracket this receives a significantly lower tax rate than the previous bracket, compared to the control group. Second, we show that this rent-seeking activity is highly detrimental for the public treasury, with a considerable reduction in fiscal revenues. And finally, we document that the monetary gains for rent-seeker politicians are rather limited. These results suggest that when fiscal policy is prone to be manipulated politicians do not hesitate to engage in rent-seeking activities even in case of little profits.

Over recent decades the family formation process radically changed in Europe. Even though similar trends have been observed across the continent there are still important differences between countries. Using the theoretical approach and conceptual definitions given by Ajzen's (1991) theory of planned behavior without applying its empirical model, the main focus of the present paper is on the way in which paid job and unpaid work and women's attitudes towards them influence the decision to have a second child. The study uses a qualitative approach, by means of the investigation of in-depth interviews with 27 women in reproductive ages in Cagliari, one of the lowest-low fertility contexts in Italy, itself a lowestlow fertility country. Mothers were divided into six different groups on the basis of their intentions to have a second child. The results demonstrate that the theoretical framework is able to highlight substantial differences in attitudes and perceived behavioural controls among the women with different intentions for childbearing.

This paper aims to investigate whether friends’ and peers’ behavior influence and individual’s entry into marriage and parenthood during the transition to adulthood of young, U.S. adults. After first studying entry into marriage and parenthood as two independent events, we then examine them as interrelated processes, thereby considering them as two joint outcomes of an individual’s unique, underlying family-formation strategy. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we engage in a series of discrete time event history models to test whether the larger the number of friends and peers who get married (or have a child), the sooner the individual gets married (or has a child). Results show strong cross-friend effects on entry into parenthood, whereas entry into marriage is only affected by peer effects. Estimates of a multiprocess model show that cross-friend effects on entry into parenthood remain strongly significant even when we control for cross-process unobserved heterogeneity.