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The paper provides a framework of how culture affects citizens' subjective well-being. According to self-determination theory, well-being is driven by the satisfaction of three basic psychological needs: autonomy, relatedness and competence. We assess if and to what extent generalized trust and the values of obedience and respect influence the Europeans’ satisfaction of these needs, controlling for income and education. We find positive impact of generalized morality (i.e. high trust and respect, low obedience). Results are robust to different checks for endogeneity, including instrumental variable regressions at country, regional and individual level as well as to panel-data estimations.

This paper shows and explains lower wealth inequality in East Asia than Western Europe over the very long-run, 1300-2000. A rich new dataset of village censuses in Japan, 1640-1870, and secondary evidence suggest Gini coefficients of wealth inequality in the East were 0.4-0.5 relative to 0.7-0.9 in the West preceding industrialization. Such regional patterns also precede the black death so any explanation must predate this. I propose the demographic institution of adoption as one such explanation. Adoption prevented the failure of male lines through which wealth was inherited. Adoption was practiced across Eurasia until the 5th century when the church began preaching against it. This increased household extinctions in Europe causing wealth concentration among surviving male lines. In contrast, the Japanese data suggest adoption prevented household extinctions and kept wealth in the family. Simulations show that this mechanism can explain much of the gap in regional wealth inequality.

I examine the post-war economic development of two regions in southern Italy exposed to mafia activity after the 1970s and apply synthetic control methods to estimate their counterfactual economic performance in the absence of organized crime. The synthetic control is a weighted average of other regions less affected by ma a activity that mimics the economic structure and outcomes of the regions of interest several years before the advent of organized crime. The comparison of actual and counterfactual development shows that the presence of ma a lowers GDP per capita by 16%, at the same time as murders increase sharply relative to the synthetic control. Evidence from electricity consumption and growth accounting suggests that lower GDP reflects a net loss of economic activity, due to the substitution of private capital with less productive public investment, rather than a mere reallocation from the official to the unofficial sector.

Abortion in Italy is free of charge and legal in a broad set of circumstances, but 71% of gynecologists refuse to perform abortions for reasons of conscientious objection. We assess whether the diverse prevalence of conscientious objection across Italian regions is linked to the inter-regional mobility of women seeking an abortion and to differences in terms of waiting time preceding the operation. Focusing on the period between 2002 and 2016, we perform a panel data analysis at the regional level, showing that a higher prevalence of objecting professionals is associated to a higher share of women having an abortion outside the region and to longer waiting times. Furthermore, using microdata on over one million abortions recorded in Italy in the same period, we find that conscientious objection is a significant driver of the individual decision of having an abortion out of the region of residence. All the models account for economic and demographic characteristics of regions, and for other possible determinants of interregional mobility. Overall, results suggest that conscientious objection can limit access to abortion at the local level.

In this paper, we show that unemployment increases child neglect in the United States during the period from 2004 to 2012. A one percentage point increase in the unemployment rate leads to a 20 percent increase in neglect. We identify this effect by instrumenting for the county-level unemployment rate with a Bartik instrument, which we create as the weighted average of the national-level unemployment rates across each of twenty industries, where the weights are the county-level fraction of the employed working-age population in each industry at the start of the sample period. An important mechanism behind this effect is that parents lack social and private safety nets. The effect on neglect is smaller in states that introduce longer extensions to unemployment benefits, and is greater in counties where an initially larger fraction of children are not covered by health insurance. We find no evidence that the effect is driven by alcohol consumption or divorce.

Although the European Union allows citizens from member countries to migrate freely within its confines to facilitate integration, it may be alienating public support for Europe. This paper investigates this by extending group threat theory to explain how internal migration influences mass public support using annual data from 1998 to 2014 across 15 Western European countries. We find that increases in the presence of foreigners from new member countries in Central and Eastern Europe have raised collective concerns about EU membership and there is some evidence that it may have eroded trust in European institutions as well. The results also show that this effect is exacerbated during an economic downturn. Our findings imply that collective opinion has responded ‘rationally’ to contextual changes in Europe’s internal migration patterns. The study concludes by discussing how group threat theory is relevant for understanding collective sentiment about the European Union.

ABSTRACT Compared to older cohorts, young adults in developed societies delay their transition to adulthood. Yet within cohorts, variations in timing and sequencing of events still remain. A major determinant of life course events is social class. This characteristic can influence the sequence of events in terms of socioeconomic inequalities through a different availability of opportunities for social mobility. Several studies show that in North America, a higher familial status tends to decrease the complexity of trajectories, while the opposite effect has been found in Southern Europe. This research examines the sequence of transitions, highlighting in a comparative perspective how life trajectories are influenced by parental social class in the United States and Italy. The main result of the analysis is that the effect of parental background is different across countries. In the United States, we find that a high status favors not only a higher education and an early entry in the labor market, but also a higher heterogeneity of states and the occurrence of new behaviors like single living and cohabitation. In Italy, the effect of social class is gender-specific. Among men, a higher social class tends to delay transitions more than lead towards modern behaviors. Among women, a higher social class either tends to facilitate the experience of a more modern and independent transition, or it generates a higher probability of postponing exit from the parental home, and then family formation, among those who completed their education and found a job.

In the last few years, the UK has adopted a fiercely competitive business tax policy by reducing the general tax burden on business and expanding individual regimes targeted to mobile factors: CFC rules, interest deductibility rules, and the Patent Box have made the UK very attractive for internationally mobile capital and profits. As the same time, the UK has strongly supported the OECD BEPS project aimed at reducing multinationals’ tax avoidance and, hence, we argue, at eliminating or constraining forms of tax competition among countries based on individual regimes targeted to mobile capital and profits. We claim that, especially in the implementation phase of the BEPS recommendations, there will be tensions between the UK competitiveness agenda and its support for the BEPS. Such tensions will be reconciled by shifting the UK tax competition policy from a mix of rate-based plus individual regimes policy to more of a rate-based approach. In this scenario, the government will have to tighten some specific measures aimed at attracting highly mobile capital and profits, such as the patent box regime and possibly interest deductions. At the same time, it will reduce the tax burden on both mobile and less mobile activities by implementing economy-wide cuts, allowed under BEPS. Most likely, such cuts would come from a further reduction in the headline corporate tax rate and the cuts announced in the July 2015 Budget should be interpreted in this light. Cuts in the headline rate essentially reduce the taxation on profits but they do not take account of the fact that for other decisions such as investment in tangible assets and information and communications technology, other elements of the tax code, such as capital allowances, are more important. To foster real investment, the government could consider an increase in capital allowances. Another option would be the introduction of an Allowance for Corporate Equity (ACE). The interesting feature of the ACE in the context of BEPS is that it reduces the incentive to classify financing instruments as tax-advantaged debt.

The paper analyses how individuals’ subjective well-being, measured both in terms of life satisfaction and mental health, is affected by the work-family balance. We measure the work-family balance so as to encompass individuals’ roles as a partner, parent and employee. We, also, consider life satisfaction in partnership, family, and work as result of satisfaction with the innate psychological needs of competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Analyses are conducted on sub-samples of parents and working parents from the German Family Panel. Findings show that, even though satisfaction in the three roles is important for both men and women, differences between the sexes persist, and that these are rooted in traditional gender roles. In particular, women’s perception of being a “good mother” and men’s perception of being a “good worker” are crucial for subjective emotional and cognitive well-being.