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2018 - n° 117 28/05/2020
This article explores opinions and semantic orientation around fertility and parenthood by scrutinizing filtered Italian Twitter data. We propose a novel methodological framework relying on Natural Language Processing techniques for text analysis, which is aimed at extracting sentiments from texts. A manual annotation for exploring sentiment and attitudes to fertility and parenthood was applied to Twitter data. The resulting set of tweets (corpus) was analysed through sentiment and emotion lexicons in order to highlight how affective language is used in this domain. It emerges that parents express a generally positive attitude towards their children and being and become parents, but quite negative sentiments on children’s future, politics and fertility and also parental behaviour. Exploiting geographical information from tweets, we find a significant correlation between the prevalence of positive sentiments about parenthood and macro-regional indicators for both life satisfaction and fertility levels.
Letizia Mencarini, Delia Irazú Hernández-Farías, Mirko Lai, Viviana Patti, Emilio Sulis, Daniele Vignoli.
Keywords: sentiment analysis,social media,fertility,parenthood,subjective well-being,linguistic corpora.
2015 - n° 73 28/05/2020
ABSTRACT Nell'ambito delle ricerche di storia economica, l'area lucchese appare relativamente trascurata dalla più recente storiografia italiana ed in particolare toscana. A parte indagini a carattere principalmente politico o demografico, il ricco patrimonio documentario conservato negli archivi lucchesi è stato fino ad oggi solo parzialmente sfruttato. Questa ricerca intende apportare nuovi dati e riflessioni inedite al dibattito che vede lo studio della disuguaglianza nella distribuzione della ricchezza come questione chiave nell’analisi dello sviluppo economico nel lungo periodo. Attraverso i dati rintracciabili negli estimi trecenteschi e cinquecenteschi e nel Catasto guinigiano dei primi anni del Quattrocento, fonti fiscali che si sono già dimostrate ottimi strumenti per misurare i livelli di ricchezza della popolazione censita e ricostruirne i trend macroeconomici di concentrazione, si cercherà di fornire un primo quadro d’insieme della distribuzione della proprietà nel contado della città della seta. Particolare attenzione sarà prestata anche al possibile impatto della Peste Nera che, stando alla storiografia più recente, pare aver determinato una lunga fase di declino nella disuguaglianza conclusasi solo attorno alla seconda metà del XV secolo. The area of Lucca seems relatively neglected by the most recent Italian economic historiography. Apart from research primarily devoted to political or demographic issues, some of which date back several decades, the rich documentary patrimony preserved in the archives of Lucca was until now only partially exploited. This paper aims to provide new data and reflections to the debate which sees the study of the inequality in the distribution of wealth as a key issue in the analysis of economic development in the long run. By using the data recorded by some fiscal registers (the estimi of the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries and the catasto guinigiano of the early fifteenth century), a kind of source which already proved to be an excellent tool to measure the levels of wealth of the surveyed population and to reconstruct its macroeconomic trends of concentration, we will try to provide a first overview of the distribution of property in the countryside of the city of silk. A particular attention will be paid also to the possible impact of the Black Death which, according to the most recent literature, seems to have led to a long period of decline in inequality ended only around the second half of the fifteenth century.
Francesco Ammannti
Keywords: economic inequality; social inequality; wealth concentration; middle ages; early modern period; Tuscany; Italy; Lucca; plague; Black Death
2015 - n° 72 28/05/2020
Abstract We document the connection between land reform and violent crime in Mexico using the counter-reform (the transformation of ejido land into private property) carried out in 1992. Using data at a municipality level, we exploit the fact that municipalities have different exposure to the reform. We report a significant impact of the land reform on the number of murders: In those municipalities with a higher proportion of social land, and therefore more exposure to the land reform, the number of murders decreased more than in those municipalities less exposed to the land reform. Our results suggest that clearly specified and consistently enforced land rights reduce gains from violence, therefore leading to lower levels of violence as measured by the number of murders.
Tommy E. Murphy, Martín A. Rossi
Keywords: agrarian reform; murders; property rights
2013 - n° 59 28/05/2020
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.
Maria Sironi, Nicola Barban, Roberto Impicciatore
Keywords: transition to adulthood; social class; parental background; sequence analysis
2010 - n° 33 28/05/2020
We develop a method for the derivation of expert-based stochastic population forecasts. The full probability distribution of forecasts is specified by expert opinions on future developments, elicited conditional on the realization of high, central, low scenarios. The procedure is applied to forecast the Italian population, using scenarios from the Italian National Statistical Office (ISTAT) and the Statistical Office of the European Union (EUROSTAT).
Francesco C. Billari, Rebecca Graziani, Eugenio Melilli
Keywords: stochastic population forecasting,random scenario,conditional expert opinions,Italian population forecasts
2022 - n° 151 24/01/2022

We analyze the relationship between natives' attitudes towards citizenship acquisition for foreigners and trust. Our hypothesis is that, in sub-Saharan Africa, the slave trade represents the deep factor behind contemporary attitudes toward citizenship, with more intense exposure to historical slave exports for an individual's ethnic group being associated with contemporary distrust for strangers, and in turn opposition to citizenship laws that favor the inclusion of foreigners. We find that individuals who are more trusting do show more positive attitudes towards the acquisition of citizenship at birth for children of foreigners, that these attitudes are also negatively related to the intensity of the slave trade, and that the underlying link between trust and the slave trade is confirmed. Alternative factors - conflict, kinship, and witchcraft beliefs - that, through trust, may affect attitudes toward citizenship, are not generating the same distinctive pattern of linkages emerging from the slave trade.

Graziella Bertocchi, Arcangelo Dimico, Gian Luca Tedeschi
Keywords: Citizenship,Trust,Slave Trade,Migration,Ethnicity,Conflict,Kinship,Witchcraft
2015 - n° 74 28/05/2020
ABSTRACT This paper reassesses the relationship between tax structure and long run income, using as indicators of tax structure both a new series of implicit tax rates based on Mendoza et al. (1997) and tax ratios, adopting a dynamic panel estimation strategy, and explicitly accounting for cross-section dependence in the panel. When implicit tax rates are used, the paper shows, the link between tax structure and long run income per capita is not robust to the adoption of different assumptions on observable and unobservable heterogeneity across countries. When tax ratios are used, there is some evidence of a negative impact of labour taxation on long run income, but this result is shown to capture non-fiscal effects coming from the evolution of the labour share. Turning to the short run, the research presented here finds strong evidence of a positive effect on per capita income of a tax shift from labour and capital taxation towards consumption taxation, which provides support for fiscal devaluations.
Giampaolo Arachi, Valeria Bucci, Alessandra Casarico
Keywords: long run income,tax structure,fiscal devaluation,cross-section dependence
2016 - n° 93 28/05/2020
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.
Pierluigi Conzo, Arnstein Aassve, Giulia Fuochi, Letizia Mencarini
Keywords: self-determination,culture,trust,subjective well-being,happiness,life satisfaction
2019 - n° 135 28/05/2020
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.
Yuzuru Kumon
Keywords: Inequality,Yuzuru Kumon
2012 - n° 54 28/05/2020
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.
Paolo Pinotti
Keywords: organized crime,economic development,synthetic control methods