News & Events
2014 - n° 64 28/05/2020
ABSTRACT
This paper investigates the short-term effects on achievement, study behaviours and attitude of an intervention providing extra instruction time to students in lower secondary schools in southern Italy. We use a difference-in-differences strategy and compare two contiguous cohorts of students enrolled in the same class for two consecutive years. We control for sorting of students and teachers across classes using the fact that, due to a recent reform, the group of teachers assigned to each class is stable over time. We find that the programme increased performances in mathematics but found no effect for Italian language test scores; the programme increased positive attitudes towards both subjects. We investigate the heterogeneity of the effects focusing on the gender dimension and find that boys and girls react differently to the intervention: girls use the extra instruction time as a complement to regular home study, while boys use it as a substitute.
2015 - n° 71 28/05/2020
ABSTRACT
This research note presents and compares some first findings obtained by the project EINITE-Economic Inequality across Italy and Europe, 1300-1800. The main aim of the project is to investigate long-term trends in economic inequality in Italy and in Europe. Here we compare previously published data for Piedmont with some early findings for Lombardy and Veneto, in order to provide a broad picture of northern Italian inequality. The period we cover is particularly long (13th–early 19th centuries) for Piedmont, while for Lombardy and Veneto a somewhat shorter period is considered (15th–18th centuries). We provide an in-depth analysis of the archival sources usable to study long-term changes in economic inequality in northern Italy, and we provide some key measures of inequality over time (Gini indexes, top percentiles). We find evidence of a tendency for Italian inequality to increase almost everywhere and almost continuously over time, since about 1400 or 1450, confirming what has been suggested by previous studies that focused on Piedmont and Tuscany.
Keywords: economic inequality; wealth concentration; poverty; wealth; middle ages; early modern period; northern Italy; Republic of Venice; Sabaudian State; State of Milan; Piedmont; Lombardy; Veneto
2010 - n° 27 28/05/2020
This article provides a picture of long-term developments in the relationship between
population and resources in Northern Italy that takes fully into account climate. It
analyzes both the slow underlying development of climatic conditions over the centuries
(in the theoretical framework of the Little Ice Age) and the consequences of short-term
periods of heightened instability. The most severe famines are shown to be events
triggered by climatic and environmental factors operating at a time when the maximum
carrying capacity of the system had been reached or, at least, when the population was
exerting considerable pressure on the potential for food production. This is the case of
the famine of the 1590s, the greatest demographic catastrophe of a non-epidemic nature
to strike Northern Italy since the Black Death and up to the end of the eighteenth
century. The article also analyzes long-term paths of agrarian innovation, suggesting
that most (but not all) of this was consistent with Boserup's idea of chain-reactions of
innovations induced by demographic pressure. These processes, though, were too slow
to compensate for a rapidly growing population. Finally, the article provides a
periodization in which the period between the famine of the 1590s and the great plague
pandemic of 1630 is shown to be the crucial turning point in how population dynamics,
climate and agrarian innovation interacted.
Keywords: history of climate,plague,famine,Little Ice Age,Malthusian crisis,Early Modern Italy,agrarian innovation,alfani
2018 - n° 113 28/05/2020
We consider the case when it is of interest to study the different states experienced over time by a set of subjects, focusing on the resulting trajectories as a whole rather than on the occurrence ofspecific events. Such situation occurs commonly in a variety of settings, for example in social and biomedical studies. Model‐based approaches, such as multistate models or Hidden Markov models, are being used increasingly to analyze trajectories and to study their relationships with a set of explanatory variables. The different assumptions underlying different models typically make the comparison of their performances difficult. In this work we introduce a novel way to accomplish this task, based on microsimulation‐based predictions. We discuss some criteria to evaluate one model and/or to compare competing models with respect to their ability to generate trajectories similar to the observed ones.
Keywords: Dissimilarity,Hidden Markov model,Interpoint distance distribution,Micro‐simulation,Multi‐state model,Optimal Matching,Sequence analysis
2021 - n° 147 29/07/2021
Understanding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on education requires a solid grasp of the impact of student autonomy on learning. In this paper, we estimate the effect of an increased autonomy policy for higher-performing students on short- and longer-term school outcomes. We exploit an institutional setting with high demand for autonomy in randomly formed classrooms. Identification comes from a natural experiment that allowed higher-achieving students to miss 30 percent more classes without penalty. Using a difference-in-difference-in-differences approach, we find that allowing higher-achieving students to skip class more often improves their performance in high-stakes subjects and increases their university admission outcomes. Higher-achieving students in more academically diverse classrooms exerted more autonomy when allowed to.
Keywords: learning autonomy,school attendance,returns to education,natural experiment
2014 - n° 66 28/05/2020
ABSTRACT
Evidence suggests that the significantly higher life expectancy levels witnessed over the past centuries are associated with a lower concentration of survival times, both cross-country and over time. The purpose of this work is to study the relationships that exist among models for the evolution of survival distributions, longevity measures, and concentration. We first study relationships between concentration and cohort longevity through empirical comparisons. We then propose a family of survival models that can be used to capture such trends in longevity and concentration across survival distributions.
Keywords: survival analysis; longevity; Gini index; life tables
2014 - n° 68 28/05/2020
ABSTRACT
During the demographic transition that in Europe tended to take place from the early 19th to the end of the 20th century, the population in European countries and its overseas offshoots increased by a factor of five or less, which is low compared to the increase now taking place in most other regions of the world. This study provides simulations showing what global and regional population sizes would be if the rest of the world experienced similar population growth patterns as were observed in Europe. European culture distinguished itself through choices that led to the European marriage pattern, characterized by late marriage, significant shares not marrying, low levels of extramarital childbearing, and comparatively low fertility. One important consequence was the relatively low population growth characterizing the cultures, religions, and ethno-linguistic groups where the European marriage pattern was dominant.
Keywords: Demographic transition; demographic simulations; European marriage pattern; Europe; fertility; transition multiplier; nineteenth century; twentieth century; historical demography
2014 - n° 69 28/05/2020
ABSTRACT
The aim of this paper is to understand how traditional societies faced a period of general crises and more specifically, which behaviours were adopted to limit the increase of local socio-economic inequality. Thus, this paper focuses on a boundary area (the Geradadda) disputed by Milan and Venice that was constantly crossed and occupied by armies during the long period of the Italian Wars (1494-1559). Analysing the management of local finances, and specifically the local commons, it is possible to show the different ways in which these societies organized themselves and, generally, how economic growth occurred in the early modern period.
Keywords: commons,inequality,cooperation,Italian wars,sixteenth century,rural societies
2015 - n° 76 28/05/2020
ABSTRACT
This paper examines how companies’ capital structure is affected by the corporate income tax system. Our analysis employs confidential company-level corporation tax return data in the UK. Our main identification strategy is based on variation in companies␣ marginal tax rates due to the existence of kinks in the corporate tax rate schedule. Using a dynamic adjustment model of capital structure, we find a positive and substantial long-run tax effect on companies' financial leverage. We show that there are considerable discrepancies between estimates of taxable profits reported in tax return data and in financial statements and that the estimated tax effect on capital structure using financial statements is likely to be biased downward. We find that companies adjust their capital structures gradually in response to changes in the marginal tax rate. Moreover, we find that the external leverage of domestic stand-alone companies and of multinational companies responds strongly to corporate tax incentives
Keywords: corporate taxation,capital structure,tax returns
2017 - n° 99 28/05/2020
We define as populist a party that champions short-term protection policies without
regard for their long-term costs. First, we study the demand for populism: we
analyze the drivers of the populist vote using individual level data from multiple waves
of surveys in Europe. Individual voting preferences are in
uenced directly by different
measures of economic insecurity and by the decline in trust in traditional parties.
However, economic shocks that undermine voters' security and trust in parties also
discourage voter turnout, thus mitigating the estimated demand of populism when
ignoring this turnout selection. Economic insecurity affects intentions to vote for populist
parties and turnout incentives also indirectly because it causes trust in parties
to fall. Second, we study the supply side: we find that populist parties are more
likely to appear when the drivers of demand for populism accumulate, and more so in
countries with weak checks and balances and with higher political fragmentation. The
non-populist parties' policy response is to reduce the distance of their platform from
that of new populist entrants, thereby magnifying the aggregate supply of populist
policies.
Keywords: voter participation,short term protection,anti-elite rhetoric