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This paper studies whether firms trade political contributions for public procurement contracts. Combining data on Lithuanian government tenders, corporate donors and firm characteristics, I examine how a ban on corporate contributions affects the awarding of procurement contracts to companies that donated in the past. Consistent with political favoritism, donors’ probability of winning falls by five percentage points as compared to that of non-donor firms after the ban. Evidence on bidding and victory margins suggests that corporate donors may receive auction-relevant information affecting procurement outcomes in their favor. I assess that tax payers save almost one percent of GDP thanks to the reform.

We use the theory of planned behavior to investigate the role of attitudes, norms and perceived behavioural control on short-term and long-term fertility intentions, using data from Norway (N = 1,307). There is some evidence that, net of other background variables, positive scores on these factors makes it easier to establish concrete childbearing plans, especially among parents. Subjective norms are particularly important among both parents and childless adults, while perceptions of behavioural control have no additional effect once the actual life situation is taken into account. Attitudes are not important in decisions about the timing of becoming a parent, probably because the main issue for childless adults is not the timing, but the decision to have a child or not.

This paper integrates efficiency wage setting in the theory of optimal redistributive income taxation. In doing so, we use a model with two skill-types, where efficiency wage setting characterizes the labor market faced by the low-skilled, whereas the high-skilled face a conventional, competitive labor market. There are two types of jobs in this economy; a low-demanding job which can be carried out by everybody, and a high-demanding job which can only be carried out by the high-skilled, meaning that a potential mimicker may either adopt a conventional income-replication strategy or a job-replication strategy. In this framework, we show that the marginal income tax implemented for the high-skilled is negative under plausible assumptions. The marginal income tax facing the low-skilled can be either positive or negative in general, even if employment-related motives for policy intervention typically contribute to an increase in this marginal tax. An increase in the unemployment benefit contributes to relax the binding self-selection constraint (irrespective of the strategy adopted by a potential mimicker), which makes this instrument particularly useful from the perspective of redistribution.

ABSTRACT In this paper we allude to a novel role played by the non-linear income tax system in the presence of adverse selection in the labor market due to asymmetric information between workers and firms. We show that an appropriate choice of the tax schedule enables the government to affect the wage distribution by controlling the transmission of information in the labor market. This represents an additional channel through which the government can foster the pursuit of its redistributive goals.

In this paper we set up a simple two-type optimal nonlinear income tax model where the single-crossing condition is violated, and we characterize the properties of a second-best optimum by considering the entire second-best Pareto frontier. The violation of single-crossing is generated by the assumption that agents dier both in terms of market abilities and in terms of their needs for a work-related good. Our analysis highlights several non-standard features of a second-best optimum. In particular, we show that a nonlinear income tax may allow the government to convert a pooling laissez-faire equilibrium into a separating equilibrium, that the second-best Pareto frontier may be discontinuous, and that a second-best optimum may not preserve the income ranking prevailing under laissez-faire. Finally, we also show that at a second-best optimum the labor supply of some agents might be distorted even though no self-selection constraint is (locally) binding in equilibrium.

In this study we review the literature on the origins and implications of family structure in historical perspective with a focus on Italian provinces. Furthermore we present newly- collected data on three of the main features of family structure: female mean age at marriage, the female celibacy rate, and the fraction of illegitimate births. The data are collected at the provincial level for 1871, the year of Italy's political unification. The analysis of the data allows us to confirm and quantify the geographic differentiation in family patterns across the country. We also illustrate the links between family structure and a set of socio-economic outcomes, in the short, medium, and long run.

How does pay-for-performance (P4P) impact productivity, multitasking, and the composition of workers in mission-oriented jobs? These are central issues in sectors like education or healthcare. We conduct a laboratory experiment, manipulating compensation and mission, to answer these questions. We find that P4P has positive effects on productivity on the incentivized dimension of effort and negative effects on the non-incentivized dimension for workers in non-mission-oriented treatments. In mission-oriented treatments, P4P generates minimal change on either dimension. Participants in the non-mission sector – but not in the mission-oriented treatments – sort on ability, with lower ability workers opting out of the P4P scheme.

In this paper we use a newly constructed dataset following 30,000 Italian individuals from high school to labor market and we analyze whether the gender composition of peers in high school affected their choice of college major, their academic performance and their labor market income. We leverage the fact that the composition of high school classmates (peers), within school-cohort and teacher-group, was not chosen by the students and it was as good as random. We find that male students graduating from classes with at least 80% of male peers were more likely to choose “prevalently male” (PM) college majors (Economics, Business and Engineering). However, this higher propensity to enroll in PM majors faded away during college (through transfers and attrition) so that men from classes with at least 80% of male peers in high school did not have higher probability of graduating in PM majors. They had instead worse college performance and did not exhibit any difference in income or labor market outcomes after college. We do not find significant effects on women.

Large variation exists in the frequency of informal childcare provided by grandparents across Europe. At the same time, a wide North-South divide characterizes European social policies. Do welfare policy arrangements shape the role of grandparents? If yes, to what extent do  grandparenting depend on the availability of public services offered for child care, parental leave regulation and legal obligations of family support? Combining micro-data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe and macro-indicators from the Multilinks database, this study aims to answer these questions and to further clarify the link between welfare provision and use of grandparents' resources for working mothers. By implementing country-specific regression models, we find a clear association between the policy context of the country of residence and (daily) grandparenting.

For a sample of Central and Eastern European countries, characterized by historically high female labor force participation and currently low fertility rates, we analyze whether fathers’ increased involvement in the family (housework and childcare) has the potential of increasing both fertility and maternal employment. Using two waves of the Generations and Gender Survey, we show that a higher fathers’ involvement in the family increases the subsequent likelihood that the mother has a second child and works full-time. Men’s fertility and work decisions are instead unrelated to mothers’ housework and childcare. We also show that fathers’ involvement in housework plays a more important role than involvement in childcare. The role of fathers’ involvement in housework is confirmed when we consider women who initially wanted or intended to have a child, women whose partner also wanted a child or women who intended to continue working.