DONDENA RESEARCH MEETING
Zoom link: https://unibocconi-it.zoom.us/s/97336263675
If you are part of the Bocconi community and if you are interested in participating in person, please send an e-mail to dondena.research@unibocconi.it. Until full room capacity is reached.
The following papers will be presented:
"Parental vaccine hesitancy: an empirical analysis of data from Italy and the UK"
by
Chiara Chiavenna - Covid Crisis Lab (Bocconi University)
Abstract
A survey about attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccination in children was administered to a representative sample of adults (aged 18+) in Italy and UK through June and July 2021. Additional questions explored demographic factors, COVID-19 risk perception, beliefs about vaccination and related information sources. Our main analysis focussed on parents of children aged 0-18: we estimated the levels of hesitancy in the parental population in the two countries, reweighting by age-specific vaccination uptake at the time of the survey. We then investigated determinants of "strong" hesitancy and compared the evidence with the group of non-parents. Preliminary results show higher levels of hesitancy in Italy, increasing with younger age of the child. Other important predictors of hesitancy were gender, trust in government, confidence in vaccines and personal vaccination history. As public health policymakers will face the challenge of targeting the most vaccine-hesitant population subgroups, these results will crucially inform future interventions.
Bio
Chiara joined the Covid Crisis Lab and Dondena research centre as a full-time postdoctoral scientist after completing her PhD at the University of Cambridge and a one-year project at Public Health England. Her research interests focus on statistical models to make inference from longitudinal observational health data, mostly collected through surveillance systems. As a PhD student, she investigated time-series methods to quantify the burden of bacterial respiratory infections secondary to influenza, in seasonal and pandemic settings, from surveillance data. At Public Health England, she worked jointly with the Statistics unit and the HIV department, using counterfactual methods to quantify the impact of interventions: she estimated the excess mortality due to COVID-19 and the effectiveness of HIV prophylaxis within the PrEP Impact trial. Prior to starting her PhD, Chiara completed a degree in Statistics and a Master's degree in Biostatistics at the University of Milano-Bicocca, and did her Master’s thesis at the Karolinska Institute.
and
"The Kids Aren't Alright: Parental Job Loss and Children's Education in Brazil"
by
Diogo Britto - CLEAN (Bocconi University)
Abstract
We study the impacts of parental job loss and unemployment benefits on children’s education in Brazil, using rich individual-level data on employment, school enrollment, and unemployment insurance for the entire population. Leveraging mass layoffs for identification, we find that parental job loss has a significant adverse impact on children’s educational outcomes. School dropouts and age-grade distortion increase by up to 1 and 2 percentage points. The effect is concentrated on disadvantaged families, persisting for at least six years and leading to lower high school completion rates. We further show that children aged 14-17 are more likely to work informally and to commit crimes following parental displacement. In turn, children in advantaged families are more likely to move to lower-quality schools due to parental displacement. Using a clean regression discontinuity design, we show that access to unemployment benefits mitigates some of the adverse impacts of parental job loss on children. Our findings indicate that the income losses following parental displacement are an important mechanism of the effects on children, highlighting the importance of policies that provide income support for displaced workers. Other explanations related to family rupture, migration to poorer neighborhoods, and changes in household production do not receive much support from the data.
Bio
Diogo Britto is a postdoc researcher in economics at Bocconi University. Previously, he has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Catholic University of Milan and a visiting scholar at the University of California - Santa Barbara. He holds a joint PhD degree in Law and Economics at the Universities of Bologna, Hamburg and Erasmus Rotterdam, a MSc from the University of Bologna and Bachelor from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He is an applied economist with interests in labor, development and political economy.