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She is doing research in Labor Economics, Gender Economics, and Economics of Science and Innovation.
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 ...
Emilio Zagheni is Director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) and Affiliate Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington, where he served as Training Director of the Center for Studies in Demography and E ...
2019 - n° 130 28/05/2020
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.
Keywords: rent-seeking,fiscal policy,personal income tax,efficiency wage,regression discontinuity design
2016 - n° 91 28/05/2020
We theoretically show that when mothers need to buy childcare services not only if they work but also if they want to search actively for a job, a reduction in the price of childcare will increase their likelihood of searching but may decrease their willingness to accept a job offer and therefore lower employment. We test these predictions empirically by means of a Regression Discontinuity design and find that the introduction in Italy of pre-kindergarten, a much cheaper alternative to day care for 2-year-old children, increased both participation in the labour market and employment of mothers of eligible children. This effect was driven largely by a significant decrease in the stated reservation wage. For a full evaluation of the policy we finally provide evidence that pre-kindergarten did not affect children’s cognitive development as measured at second grade.
Keywords: child care,female labour supply,public services
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.
Keywords: Proportional representation,Median voter,Taxation,Occupational Choice,Migration,Walls.