Working papers results

We analyze the relationship between natives' attitudes towards citizenship acquisition for foreigners and trust. Our hypothesis is that, in sub-Saharan Africa, the slave trade represents the deep factor behind contemporary attitudes toward citizenship, with more intense exposure to historical slave exports for an individual's ethnic group being associated with contemporary distrust for strangers, and in turn opposition to citizenship laws that favor the inclusion of foreigners. We find that individuals who are more trusting do show more positive attitudes towards the acquisition of citizenship at birth for children of foreigners, that these attitudes are also negatively related to the intensity of the slave trade, and that the underlying link between trust and the slave trade is confirmed. Alternative factors - conflict, kinship, and witchcraft beliefs - that, through trust, may affect attitudes toward citizenship, are not generating the same distinctive pattern of linkages emerging from the slave trade.

We investigate the gender gap in Economics among bachelor's and master's graduates in Italy between 2010 and 2019. First we establish that being female exerts a negative impact on the choice to major in Economics: at the bachelor level, only 73 women graduate in Economics for every 100 men, with the mathematical content of high school curricula as the key driver of the effect and a persistence of the gap at the master level. Second, within a full menu of major choices, Economics displays the largest gap, followed by STEM and then Business Economics. Third, decomposition analyses expose a unique role for the math background in driving the Economics gender gap relative to other elds. Fourth, a triple difference analysis of a high school reform shows that an increase in the math content of traditionally low math curricula caused an increase in the Economics gender gap among treated students.

Sexual harassment and sexists behaviors are pervasive issues in the workplace. Around 12% of women in France have been subjected to toxic behaviors at work in the last year, including sexist comments, moral, sexual or physical harassment, or violence. Such toxic behaviors can not only deter women from entering the labor market, but can also lead them to leave toxic workplaces at their own expense. This article is one of the first to examine the relationship between toxic behaviors and worker flows. We use the #MeToo movement as an exogenous shock to France’s workplace norms regarding toxic behaviors. We combine survey data on reported toxic behaviors in firms with exhaustive administrative data to create a measure of toxic behaviors risk for all French establishments. We use a triple-difference strategy comparing female and male worker flows in high-risk versus low-risk firms before and after #MeToo. We find that #MeToo increased women’s relative quit rates in higher-risk workplaces, while men’s worker flows remained unaffected. This demonstrates the existence of a double penalty for women working in high-risk environments, as they are not only more frequently the victims of toxic behaviors, but are also forced to quit their jobs in order to avoid them.

Scarcity of female academics has been well documented for math-intensive or STEM fields. We investigate whether a lack of female instructors creates a demand for diversity on the student side. In an incentivized instructor-choice experiment on MTurk, we experimentally vary the gender balancedness of the instructor pool and let participants choose one additional instructor among one male and one female. We find that only women are more likely to choose the female instructor when the pool of instructors is male-dominated, suggesting that female students appreciate a more balanced instructor pool if female professors are scarce. We further document that women also appreciate diversity (though to a lesser extent) if the scarce gender is of the opposite sex. In contrast, men only appreciate diversity if the scarce gender is their own.

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.

In the past decade, the world has witnessed increased climate change impacts with many countries experiencing more frequent and more severe climate extremes. With public support being fundamental in scaling up climate action, here, we analyze the impact of exposure to climate extremes on environmental concern and Green voting for a large panel of European countries. Combining high-resolution climatological data with regionally aggregated and harmonized information on environmental concern (42 Eurobarometer surveys, 2002-2019, 34 countries) and European Parliamentary electoral outcomes (7 elections, 1990-2019, 28 countries) at the subnational level, we find a significant and sizeable effect of temperature anomalies, heat episodes and dry spells in the previous 12 months on green concern and voting. The effects differ significantly by region and are most pronounced in regions with a cooler Continental or temperate Atlantic climate, and weaker in regions with a warmer Mediterranean climate. The relationship is moderated by regional GDP suggesting that climate change experience increase public support for climate action only under favorable economic conditions. By empirically documenting the important role of contextual influences and regional differences on green concern and voting, our findings have important implications for the current efforts to promote and implement climate actions in line with the Paris Agreement.

Abortion in Italy is free of charge and legal in a broad set of circumstances, but 71% of gynecologists refuse to perform abortions for reasons of conscientious objection. We assess whether the diverse prevalence of conscientious objection across Italian regions is linked to the inter-regional mobility of women seeking an abortion and to differences in terms of waiting time preceding the operation. Focusing on the period between 2002 and 2016, we perform a panel data analysis at the regional level, showing that a higher prevalence of objecting professionals is associated to a higher share of women having an abortion outside the region and to longer waiting times. Furthermore, using microdata on over one million abortions recorded in Italy in the same period, we find that conscientious objection is a significant driver of the individual decision of having an abortion out of the region of residence. All the models account for economic and demographic characteristics of regions, and for other possible determinants of interregional mobility. Overall, results suggest that conscientious objection can limit access to abortion at the local level.

This paper provides an overview of economic inequality in Germany from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries. It represents the first attempt at reconstructing long-term trends in wealth inequality in a central European area. It builds upon the data produced by the German Historical School, which from the late nineteenth century pioneered inequality studies, but also adds new archival information for selected communities and areas. Overall during the early modern period inequality was found to be increasing, as seems to have been the case in most of the European continent, but with an important local specificity: the terribly destructive Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), together with the plague epidemic of 1627-29, are found to have caused a temporary but significant phase of reduction in inequality. This is in stark contrast to other European areas for which information is available, from Italy to the Low Countries, where during 1500-1800 inequality growth was monotonic. Some evidence of a drop in inequality is also found after the Black Death of 1348-49, but in at least part of Germany inequality growth seems to have resumed immediately after that plague. Our findings contribute to deepen and to nuance our knowledge of long-term inequality trends in preindustrial Europe, and offer new material to current debates on the determinants of inequality change in western societies, past and present.

The paper analyses how individuals’ subjective well-being, measured both in terms of life satisfaction and mental health, is affected by the work-family balance. We measure the work-family balance so as to encompass individuals’ roles as a partner, parent and employee. We, also, consider life satisfaction in partnership, family, and work as result of satisfaction with the innate psychological needs of competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Analyses are conducted on sub-samples of parents and working parents from the German Family Panel. Findings show that, even though satisfaction in the three roles is important for both men and women, differences between the sexes persist, and that these are rooted in traditional gender roles. In particular, women’s perception of being a “good mother” and men’s perception of being a “good worker” are crucial for subjective emotional and cognitive well-being.

Abstract We document the connection between land reform and violent crime in Mexico using the counter-reform (the transformation of ejido land into private property) carried out in 1992. Using data at a municipality level, we exploit the fact that municipalities have different exposure to the reform. We report a significant impact of the land reform on the number of murders: In those municipalities with a higher proportion of social land, and therefore more exposure to the land reform, the number of murders decreased more than in those municipalities less exposed to the land reform. Our results suggest that clearly specified and consistently enforced land rights reduce gains from violence, therefore leading to lower levels of violence as measured by the number of murders.