Working papers results

Long-term developments in economic inequality are attracting growing attention. Earlier works focused on producing reliable measures of inequality, which overall suggest that in Europe, inequality levels were already high in preindustrial times and tended to grow almost continuously from the Middle Ages until the eve of the Industrial Revolution. Proposing a significantly different perspective, this article explores whether the change in inequality is connected to a change in how a condition of unequal distribution of property/income was perceived. By referring to large databases of manuscripts and printed editions covering ca. 1100-1830, we measure the occurrences of keywords connected to the notions of equality/inequality to determine when inequality became a topic considered worthy of specific reflection. Key texts are analyzed in depth to discover how and when such keywords acquired an economic meaning. Lastly, changes in meaning are connected to changes in levels of economic inequality. We demonstrate that the notions of equality/inequality appeared first in scholarly fields far from economic concerns and only slowly acquired economic meanings. This process intensified in the decades preceding the French Revolution of 1789, suggesting that changes in inequality levels contributed to brewing political upheaval in the Age of Revolutions.

The paper gives an update to earlier analysis considering youth poverty and transition to adulthood, which is timely given the economic crisis engulfing many countries in Europe. Whereas, the crisis is affecting young people in particular, there is also huge variation across Europe. We document the short-term consequences of the current recession on the transition to adulthood of young Europeans, focusing on two main cornerstones in the transition to adulthood: economic independence and residential autonomy. We show an almost universal increase in financial hardship experienced by young adults during the recession, which is starting to translate into higher rates of co-residence with parents, hence delaying the process of leaving home and gaining economic independence. The economic recession will have a huge impact on young people and their the transition to adulthood. Economic deprivation and uncertainty will most likely delay the key markers of transition to adulthood.

This paper aims to investigate whether friends’ and peers’ behavior influence and individual’s entry into marriage and parenthood during the transition to adulthood of young, U.S. adults. After first studying entry into marriage and parenthood as two independent events, we then examine them as interrelated processes, thereby considering them as two joint outcomes of an individual’s unique, underlying family-formation strategy. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we engage in a series of discrete time event history models to test whether the larger the number of friends and peers who get married (or have a child), the sooner the individual gets married (or has a child). Results show strong cross-friend effects on entry into parenthood, whereas entry into marriage is only affected by peer effects. Estimates of a multiprocess model show that cross-friend effects on entry into parenthood remain strongly significant even when we control for cross-process unobserved heterogeneity.

We argue that fertility trends in advanced societies are in part driven by differences in trust. The argument builds around the idea that trust implies individuals and couples being willing to outsource traditional family activities to other individuals outside their own family. Trust is therefore seen as a catalyser for the process of increased female labour force participation, the diffusion of childcare facilities, and hence a halt to the continuing fertility decline. Support of this hypothesis is drawn from the World Values Survey and European Values Survey. We present evidence both from country-level regressions and from a series of multilevel analyses. We find that trust by itself is positively associated with fertility over recent decades. Moreover, trust interacts with women’s education. In particular, as higher education for women has expanded, which traditionally is seen as a robust predictor for lower fertility, trust is a precondition for achieving higher fertility among those women with very high education.

I examine the post-war economic development of two regions in southern Italy exposed to mafia activity after the 1970s and apply synthetic control methods to estimate their counterfactual economic performance in the absence of organized crime. The synthetic control is a weighted average of other regions less affected by ma a activity that mimics the economic structure and outcomes of the regions of interest several years before the advent of organized crime. The comparison of actual and counterfactual development shows that the presence of ma a lowers GDP per capita by 16%, at the same time as murders increase sharply relative to the synthetic control. Evidence from electricity consumption and growth accounting suggests that lower GDP reflects a net loss of economic activity, due to the substitution of private capital with less productive public investment, rather than a mere reallocation from the official to the unofficial sector.

Interpersonal trust favors the expansion of organizations by allowing the delegation of decisions and tasks among anonymous others or people that interact only infrequently. We document these facts for a representative survey of Italian manufacturing firms and use this source of data to construct an industry-specific measure of need-for-delegation in production. We then show that trust shapes comparative advantage, as high-trust regions and countries exhibit larger value added and export shares in delegation-intensive industries relative to other industries. Such effects are associated with an increase in average firm size, while the number of firms is not significantly affected. Larger average size reflects in turn a shift of the distribution away from the smallest firms, consistently with the idea that trust allows organizations to expand beyond the narrow circle of family members and close friends.

We present a theoretical model of immigration and crime in which legal status raises the opportunity cost of crime, illegal immigrants may be deported, and there is endogenous selection into legal status. We estimate the model exploiting administrative records on the universe of prison inmates pardoned with a clemency bill in Italy on August 2006, and exogenous variation in legal status after the European Union enlargement of January 2007. The causal effect of legal status amounts to a 50% reduction in recidivism, and explains 1/2 to 2/3 of the observed differences in crime rates between legal and illegal immigrants.

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.

This paper investigates how social interactions among friends shape fertility. We specifically examine whether and how friends' fertility behaviour affects an individual's transition to parenthood. By integrating insights from economic and sociological theories, we elaborate on the mechanisms via which interactions among friends might affect an individual's risk of becoming a parent. By exploiting the survey design of the Add Health data, we follow a strategy that allows us to properly identify interaction effects and distinguish them from selection and contextual effects. We engage in a series of discrete time event history models with random effect at the dyadic level. Results show that, net of confounding effects, a friend's childbearing increases an individual's risk of becoming a parent. We find a short-term, curvilinear effect: an individual's risk of childbearing starts increasing after a friend's childbearing, it reaches its peak around two years later, and then decreases.

A fundamental switch in the fertilitydevelopment relationship has occurred so that among highly developed countries, further socioeconomic development may reverse the declining fertility trend. Here we shed light on the mechanisms underlying this reversal by analyzing the links between development and age and cohort patterns of fertility, as well as the role of gender equality. Using data from 1975 to 2008 for over 100 countries, we show that the reversal exists both in a period and a cohort perspective and is mainly driven by increasing older reproductive-age fertility. We also show that the positive impact of development on fertility in high-development countries is conditional on gender equality: countries ranking high in development as measured by health, income, and education but low in gender equality continue to experience declining fertility. Our findings suggest that gender equality is crucial for countries wishing to reap the fertility dividend of high development.