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Veronica's research lies at the intersection of health economics and social policy and her work brings together economic perspectives and quantitative methodologies to address critical questions in global health policy and institutions. More specific ...
His work focused on developing compartmental models to assess the role of demography in shaping inter-country differences in epidemiological patterns of infectious diseases and developing bayesian methods for economic evaluation analysis of alternati ...
Mattia Viale is Post-doctoral Research Fellow within the ERC project "SMITE - Social Mobility and Inequality accross Italy and Europe, 1300-1800" led by Guido Alfani. His main research fields are on consumption behaviours, material living standards, ...
Tamás Vonyó is Associate Professor of Economic History at Bocconi University, Department of Social and Political Sciences. He is principal investigator of the ERC Horizon 2020 project SpoilsofWAR, which investigates the economic consequences of World ...
2015 - n° 82 28/05/2020
This paper analyzes how advanced Medieval and Early Modern Italian economies attempted to cope with famines. First, it provides an overview of the occurrence of famines and food shortages in Italy from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, underlining the connections with overall climatic and demographic trends. Second, it focuses on the 1590s famine (the worst to affect Italy in the period), providing a general discussion and interpretation of its causes and characteristics, and describing and evaluating the strategies for coping with the crisis that developed within the Republic of Genoa and the Duchy of Ferrara. The article argues that when such a large-scale food crisis as that of the 1590s occurred, public action played a key role in providing relief.
Guido Alfani
Keywords: famine; mortality crises; subsistence crises; Italy; early modern period; 1590s; markets integration; grain trade; agrarian innovation
2017 - n° 110 28/05/2020
This paper provides an overview of economic inequality in Germany from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries. It represents the first attempt at reconstructing long-term trends in wealth inequality in a central European area. It builds upon the data produced by the German Historical School, which from the late nineteenth century pioneered inequality studies, but also adds new archival information for selected communities and areas. Overall during the early modern period inequality was found to be increasing, as seems to have been the case in most of the European continent, but with an important local specificity: the terribly destructive Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), together with the plague epidemic of 1627-29, are found to have caused a temporary but significant phase of reduction in inequality. This is in stark contrast to other European areas for which information is available, from Italy to the Low Countries, where during 1500-1800 inequality growth was monotonic. Some evidence of a drop in inequality is also found after the Black Death of 1348-49, but in at least part of Germany inequality growth seems to have resumed immediately after that plague. Our findings contribute to deepen and to nuance our knowledge of long-term inequality trends in preindustrial Europe, and offer new material to current debates on the determinants of inequality change in western societies, past and present.
Guido Alfani, Felix Schaff, Victoria Gierok
Keywords: Economic inequality; social inequality; wealth concentration; middle ages; early modern period; Germany; central Europe; plague; war; Black Death; Thirty Years’ War; poverty
2019 - n° 121 28/05/2020
Proportional electoral rules favour the election of women with respect to majoritarian ones. This is consistent with the fact that in majoritarian systems personal exposure of the candidate is more relevant than in proportional systems and that women tend to be averse to such exposure. To test the effects of electoral rules on women’s representation and the quality of politicians, we collect panel data on the universe of Italian politicians from all levels of government over the period 1987-2013 and analyse an Italian reform which, in 2005, changed the electoral rule for national elections from (mostly) majoritarian to proportional, but did not affect subnational level elections. We find that this reform increased the number of women elected, while not decreasing the quality of politicians. We provide evidence of a negative selection effect under proportional rules: the elected women are not the best candidates and the quality of elected politicians could have increased (rather than remain constant) if the best female candidates had been elected. Our results are stronger in gender traditional regions, suggesting that culture matters in terms of how electoral rules affect female political representation.
Paola Profeta, Eleanor Woodhouse.
Keywords: Electoral reforms,Majoritarian,Proportional,Electoral Competition,Political Selection,Difference-in-Differences.
2017 - n° 104 28/05/2020
When exposed to similar migration flows, countries with different institutional systems may respond with different levels of openness. We study in particular the different responses determined by different electoral systems. We find that Winner Take All countries would tend to be more open than countries with PR when all other policies are kept constant, but, crucially, if we consider the endogenous differences in redistribution levels across systems, then the openness ranking may switch.
Massimo Morelli, Margherita Negri.
Keywords: Proportional representation,Median voter,Taxation,Occupational Choice,Migration,Walls.
2019 - n° 134 28/05/2020
OBJECTIVE: In this study we test whether perceived stability of employment and perceived resilience to potential job loss affect fertility intentions, net of individual level risk attitudes and considering variation in the local macroeconomic conditions. BACKGROUND: The role of employment uncertainty as a fertility driver has been explored in a number of studies with a limited set of constructs, and with inconclusive results. A key reason for this heterogeneous pattern is that scholars did not recognize the multidimensionality and the prospective nature of employment uncertainty. We address these oversights by considering two key dimensions of employment uncertainty: perceived stability of employment and perceived resilience to potential job loss. METHOD: Our study is conducted using the newly-released 2017 OECD Italian Trustlab survey and its built-in module on self-assessed employment uncertainty (N=521). We perform multivariate analysis using ordered logistic regression. RESULTS: Perception of employment resilience was a powerful predictor of fertility intentions, whereas perception of employment stability had only a limited impact. The observed relationship between resilience and fertility intentions was robust to the inclusion of person-specific risk attitude and it did not depend on aggregate-level variables, such as unemployment and fixed-term contract rates in the area of residence. CONCLUSION: With this paper, we argue that the notion of resilience is crucial for making sense of economic prospects in connection to fertility planning.
Arianna Gatta, Francesco Mattioli, Letizia Mencarini, Daniele Vignoli
Keywords: Employment Uncertainty; Fertility Intentions; Resilience; Stability; Italy; Trustlab survey