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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 ...
Associate Professor
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.
Tommaso Giommoni
Keywords: rent-seeking,fiscal policy,personal income tax,efficiency wage,regression discontinuity design
2011 - n° 47 28/05/2020
Over recent decades the family formation process radically changed in Europe. Even though similar trends have been observed across the continent there are still important differences between countries. Using the theoretical approach and conceptual definitions given by Ajzen's (1991) theory of planned behavior without applying its empirical model, the main focus of the present paper is on the way in which paid job and unpaid work and women's attitudes towards them influence the decision to have a second child. The study uses a qualitative approach, by means of the investigation of in-depth interviews with 27 women in reproductive ages in Cagliari, one of the lowest-low fertility contexts in Italy, itself a lowestlow fertility country. Mothers were divided into six different groups on the basis of their intentions to have a second child. The results demonstrate that the theoretical framework is able to highlight substantial differences in attitudes and perceived behavioural controls among the women with different intentions for childbearing.
Laura Cavalli
Keywords: fertility intentions,second birth,paid work,unpaid jobs,theory of planned behavior,qualitative research methods
Alberto Zanardi is currently a member of the Board of the Italian Parliamentary Budget Office. He is full professor in Public Finance at the University of Bologna (currently on leave). He graduated from Bocconi University and received a M.Sc. in Econ ...