Working papers results

Climate change-induced temperature increases and extreme weather events are impacting human health and wellbeing. Warmer temperatures are reported to affect both reproductive health and behaviors, possibly reducing birth rates. In a low fertility context, the potential negative impact that climate change might have on fertility is consequential. This study focuses on Italy, a low-fertility country disproportionately affected by climate change, with sharp regional disparities in both climate zones and economic development. Matching monthly birth registration data for the period 2003 to 2022 with E-OBS meteorological data, we analyze the relationship between heat exposure and total fertility rates in 107 Italian provinces (corresponding to the NUTS-3 classification). Results show that exposure to extremely hot days, which are defined as days with a mean temperature above 25°C, has a relatively immediate impact on conception probabilities as it reduces the total fertility rate nine months later. While this reduction is observed across both cold and hot climate zones, it appears to be larger for warmer provinces. The effect of temperature on fertility also varies with the per capita gross domestic product, where fertility rates in the richest provinces appear to be more sensitive to warming temperatures. The interaction between climate zones and GDP per capita revealed that hot above-average GDP provinces are the most affected by hot temperatures. 

We investigate the gender gaps in preferences for redistribution using data from the European Social Survey (ESS) over the period spanning from 2002 to 2022. We integrate individual-level socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, attitudinal factors, and macro-level influences. Our findings confirm significant differences among genders, with women generally expressing stronger preferences for redistribution than men. However, we uncover the multidimensionality of these gaps. Through a Gelbach decomposition analysis, our study identifies differences in beliefs and attitudes, especially egalitarian values and political ideology, as primary drivers of the observed gaps. Additionally, we document that not all women are more redistributive than men. The gender gaps, indeed, are neither uniform across age cohorts nor along different country-level conditions. Overall, the adult gender gap is the most pronounced, even if this evidence varies along macroeconomic contexts, across welfare regimes, and over time. Our  findings underscore the complexity of redistributive preferences, representing a challenge for future policy design from a gender-sensitive perspective.

This paper investigates whether the characteristics of locally elected officials influenced
excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data on Italy—
one of the first countries to be severely affected—we examine whether mayoral
education influenced municipal-level mortality outcomes. We estimate weekly
excess mortality using official death statistics and a Bayesian hierarchical spatiotemporal
model. To address endogeneity in political selection, we implement
a close-election Regression Discontinuity Design. We find that college-educated
mayors significantly reduced mortality during the first wave of the pandemic, by
lowering both the likelihood of excess deaths and the excess mortality rate. These
effects are not observed in the second wave, likely due to policy convergence and
a stronger role played by national and regional institutions. Our design interprets
education as a proxy for broader leadership traits, such as decision-making capacity
under uncertainty. The findings underscore that political selection can have
real demographic consequences, shaping population outcomes during crises.

We study whether (and why) self-employed individuals have higher fertility than employees.
Macro- and micro-level studies have produced inconsistent findings. Self-employment has been associated with income uncertainty and instability and may be negatively related to fertility. However, self-employment also implies workplace flexibility and higher potential income and may positively affect fertility. These mechanisms operate differently for men and women. We use the Italian Survey on Household Income and Wealth for 1995-2014, which includes objective and subjective fertility measures, and distinguish between three types of self-employment: laborer (solo) self-employment, entrepreneurship, and professionals. We show that all self-employed men and laborer self-employed women have higher fertility than comparable wage earners of the same sex. Using an instrumental variable treatment-effect regression approach and work histories, we show that self-employment causes higher fertility. We provide evidence that male and female entrepreneurs have more children because they would like to pass their business to their offspring (and rely on the family labor supply). Contrary to the US studies, Italian women do not perceive self-employment as facilitating work-life balance or encouraging childbearing.

Despite the efforts to reduce gender gaps, women are still under-represented among politicians. This paper suggests a new channel to explain female disadvantage in electoral success related to politicians’ ability to extend their electorate and attract voters from opponent parties. I rely on Swiss elections exploiting several features of this setting. This electoral system is based on open lists (voters can select candidates within their favorite party), and it allows cross-voting (voters can also select candidates from lists other than their favorite). Furthermore, electoral registers report the amount of preference votes collected by each politician separately by the voter’s favorite party. I show that individual preference votes are an essential driver of gender differences in candidates ’success. Interestingly, while no gender gap emerges in preferences cast by party supporters, male politicians collect more preference votes through cross-voting than females, i.e. they are more successful in persuading voters from competing parties. Motivated by several mechanisms, these new results bring salient policy implications concerning the impact of electoral systems on female representation.

Women’s labor force participation has increased remarkably in western countries, but important gender gaps still remain, especially among parents. This paper uses a novel comparative perspective assessing women’s and men’s mid-life employment trajectories by parity and education. We provide new insight into the gendered parenthood penalty by analyzing the long-term implications, beyond the core childbearing ages by decomposing years lived between ages 40 to 74 into years in employment, inactivity, and retirement. We compare three countries with very different institutional settings and cultural norms: Finland, Italy, and the U.S. Our empirical approach uses the multistate incidence-based life table method. Our results document large cross-national variation, and the key role that education plays. In Finland years employed increase with parity for women and men and the gender gap is small; in the U.S. the relation between parity and years employed is relatively flat whereas among those with two or more children a gender gap emerges; and in Italy, years employed decreases sharply with parity for women, and increases for men. Education elevates years employed similarly for all groups in Finland; but in the U.S and Italy, highly educated mothers experience only half of the gender gap compared to low-educated mothers. The employment trajectories of childless women and men differ greatly across countries.  

It is widely acknowledged that the quest for social status can result in an inefficient consumption ”rat-race” and the existing literature has discussed how taxes can mitigate the associated externalities. We suggest a new reason to tax conspicuous consumption. Our paper highlights that taxing status goods can achieve a more equitable distribution of welfare by compressing the status distribution. By curbing the conspicuous consumption of the wealthy, the government renders signaling less informative and increases the share of the social status surplus derived by the less wealthy. This ”status channel” serves as a complement to traditional monetary channels of redistribution.

State interventions to decrease the gender wage gap are often criticized for creating one-approach-forall which may be inappropriate for the specific difficulties faced by each sector and firm. In this paper, I study a unique policy where French firms were mandated by law to negotiate agreements on gender equality with union representatives. I estimate the causal effect of the signature of such agreements on the wage gap and other measures of gender inequalities. Using a unique combination of administrative datasets, I exploit the staggered signature of agreements over the 2010-2013 period and find that the law had an effect on the signature of those agreements but did not alter the gender wage gap nor many other outcomes reflecting gender inequalities. The absence of gender-related changes can plausibly be explained by the lack of obligation of result in the law and by the weak oversight of agreements’ content.

We study the joint design of nonlinear income and education taxes when the government pursues redistributive objectives. A key feature of our setup is that the ability type of an agent can affect both the costs and benefits of acquiring education. Market remuneration of agents depends on both their innate ability type and their educational choices. Our focus is on the properties of constrained efficient allocations when educational choices are publicly observable at the individual level, but earned income is subject to misreporting. We find that income-misreporting (IM) affects the optimal distortions on income and education and shed light on the reasons for it and mechanisms through which it is done. We show how and why IM strengthens the case for downward distorting the educational choices of low-ability agents. Finally, we find that IM provides another mechanism that makes commodity taxation useful.

The standard model of household behavior predicts that couples cooperate to maximize family income. This paper shows that gender identity norms repre- sent an important friction preventing family income maximization. For identi- fication, we focus on an Italian policy that grants a large tax credit to the main earner in a couple when the second earner reports income below a cutoff. Using new tax returns data, we show large bunching responses at the tax credit cut- off from second earner women, but no response from second earner men. This result suggests that household decisions are not Pareto-efficient when men are the second earner within the couple. Gender differences in bunching mostly emerge after marriage and childbirth, and do not reflect any gender-specific dif- ference in scope for bunching. In support of the view that gender norms drive our results, we find that gender differences in bunching are relatively larger among immigrants coming from more conservative societies, and natives liv- ing in more gender-traditional municipalities. Additionally, these results have important implications for gender inequality: we show that the spouse tax credit persistently limits women’s careers and amplifies the gender income gap.