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State interventions to decrease the gender wage gap are often criticized for creating one-approach-forall which may be inappropriate for the specific difficulties faced by each sector and firm. In this paper, I study a unique policy where French firms were mandated by law to negotiate agreements on gender equality with union representatives. I estimate the causal effect of the signature of such agreements on the wage gap and other measures of gender inequalities. Using a unique combination of administrative datasets, I exploit the staggered signature of agreements over the 2010-2013 period and find that the law had an effect on the signature of those agreements but did not alter the gender wage gap nor many other outcomes reflecting gender inequalities. The absence of gender-related changes can plausibly be explained by the lack of obligation of result in the law and by the weak oversight of agreements’ content.

This paper investigates whether the characteristics of locally elected officials influenced
excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data on Italy—
one of the first countries to be severely affected—we examine whether mayoral
education influenced municipal-level mortality outcomes. We estimate weekly
excess mortality using official death statistics and a Bayesian hierarchical spatiotemporal
model. To address endogeneity in political selection, we implement
a close-election Regression Discontinuity Design. We find that college-educated
mayors significantly reduced mortality during the first wave of the pandemic, by
lowering both the likelihood of excess deaths and the excess mortality rate. These
effects are not observed in the second wave, likely due to policy convergence and
a stronger role played by national and regional institutions. Our design interprets
education as a proxy for broader leadership traits, such as decision-making capacity
under uncertainty. The findings underscore that political selection can have
real demographic consequences, shaping population outcomes during crises.

We investigate the gender gaps in preferences for redistribution using data from the European Social Survey (ESS) over the period spanning from 2002 to 2022. We integrate individual-level socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, attitudinal factors, and macro-level influences. Our findings confirm significant differences among genders, with women generally expressing stronger preferences for redistribution than men. However, we uncover the multidimensionality of these gaps. Through a Gelbach decomposition analysis, our study identifies differences in beliefs and attitudes, especially egalitarian values and political ideology, as primary drivers of the observed gaps. Additionally, we document that not all women are more redistributive than men. The gender gaps, indeed, are neither uniform across age cohorts nor along different country-level conditions. Overall, the adult gender gap is the most pronounced, even if this evidence varies along macroeconomic contexts, across welfare regimes, and over time. Our  findings underscore the complexity of redistributive preferences, representing a challenge for future policy design from a gender-sensitive perspective.

We study the joint design of nonlinear income and education taxes when the government pursues redistributive objectives. A key feature of our setup is that the ability type of an agent can affect both the costs and benefits of acquiring education. Market remuneration of agents depends on both their innate ability type and their educational choices. Our focus is on the properties of constrained efficient allocations when educational choices are publicly observable at the individual level, but earned income is subject to misreporting. We find that income-misreporting (IM) affects the optimal distortions on income and education and shed light on the reasons for it and mechanisms through which it is done. We show how and why IM strengthens the case for downward distorting the educational choices of low-ability agents. Finally, we find that IM provides another mechanism that makes commodity taxation useful.

Climate change-induced temperature increases and extreme weather events are impacting human health and wellbeing. Warmer temperatures are reported to affect both reproductive health and behaviors, possibly reducing birth rates. In a low fertility context, the potential negative impact that climate change might have on fertility is consequential. This study focuses on Italy, a low-fertility country disproportionately affected by climate change, with sharp regional disparities in both climate zones and economic development. Matching monthly birth registration data for the period 2003 to 2022 with E-OBS meteorological data, we analyze the relationship between heat exposure and total fertility rates in 107 Italian provinces (corresponding to the NUTS-3 classification). Results show that exposure to extremely hot days, which are defined as days with a mean temperature above 25°C, has a relatively immediate impact on conception probabilities as it reduces the total fertility rate nine months later. While this reduction is observed across both cold and hot climate zones, it appears to be larger for warmer provinces. The effect of temperature on fertility also varies with the per capita gross domestic product, where fertility rates in the richest provinces appear to be more sensitive to warming temperatures. The interaction between climate zones and GDP per capita revealed that hot above-average GDP provinces are the most affected by hot temperatures. 

The standard model of household behavior predicts that couples cooperate to maximize family income. This paper shows that gender identity norms repre- sent an important friction preventing family income maximization. For identi- fication, we focus on an Italian policy that grants a large tax credit to the main earner in a couple when the second earner reports income below a cutoff. Using new tax returns data, we show large bunching responses at the tax credit cut- off from second earner women, but no response from second earner men. This result suggests that household decisions are not Pareto-efficient when men are the second earner within the couple. Gender differences in bunching mostly emerge after marriage and childbirth, and do not reflect any gender-specific dif- ference in scope for bunching. In support of the view that gender norms drive our results, we find that gender differences in bunching are relatively larger among immigrants coming from more conservative societies, and natives liv- ing in more gender-traditional municipalities. Additionally, these results have important implications for gender inequality: we show that the spouse tax credit persistently limits women’s careers and amplifies the gender income gap.