Working papers results

Are public good games really capturing individuals’ willingness to contribute to real-life public goods? To answer this question, we conducted a lab-in-the-field experiment with communities who own collective goods. In our experiment, subjects voluntarily contribute to a common pool, which can either be subdivided in individual vouchers, as in standard public good games, or used to acquire collective goods, as it happens for real-life public goods. We show that participants’ contributions are larger when the voucher is paid individually, suggesting that individuals’ willingness to contribute to public goods may be overestimated when based on results from laboratory experiments.

The vast majority of studies looking into the relationship between childbearing and subjective well-being uses overall measures where respondents either report their general level of happiness or their life satisfaction, leaving substantial doubt about the underlying mechanisms. However, life satisfaction and happiness are intuitively multidimensional concepts, simply because there cannot be only one aspect that affects individuals' well-being. In this study, by considering seventeen specific life satisfaction domains, these features come out very clearly. Whereas all the domains considered matter for the overall life satisfaction, only three of them, namely satisfaction with leisure, health and satisfaction with the partnership, change dramatically surrounding childbearing events. Even though we cannot generalize (since these results stems from one particular panel survey, i.e. Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia data), it appears that the typical anticipation and post-child decrease of life satisfaction, so often found in existing studies, stem from changes in these three domains.

This article explores opinions and semantic orientation around fertility and parenthood by scrutinizing filtered Italian Twitter data. We propose a novel methodological framework relying on Natural Language Processing techniques for text analysis, which is aimed at extracting sentiments from texts. A manual annotation for exploring sentiment and attitudes to fertility and parenthood was applied to Twitter data. The resulting set of tweets (corpus) was analysed through sentiment and emotion lexicons in order to highlight how affective language is used in this domain. It emerges that parents express a generally positive attitude towards their children and being and become parents, but quite negative sentiments on children’s future, politics and fertility and also parental behaviour. Exploiting geographical information from tweets, we find a significant correlation between the prevalence of positive sentiments about parenthood and macro-regional indicators for both life satisfaction and fertility levels.

As more studies focus on social trust and link it to the working of economies and societies, measuring properly this concept is growing in importance. Indeed, as it is a complex construct, entangled to other notions such as reciprocity, it is hard to obtain reliable and accurate measures of it. To mend for this, the OECD has launched Trustlab: a project aimed at creating the first internationally comparable and nationally representative database on trust and social preferences using both survey and experimental approaches. As of March 2018, Trustlab surveys have been run in 6 countries. In this paper we present the data and peculiarities of Trustlab Italy, in which, in addition to the measures of trust, data on personality traits and fertility intentions have been collected.

This article combines two apparently distinct strands of contemporary research on fertility: the literature on economic uncertainty and fertility and the literature on subjective well-being and fertility. We advance the hypothesis that the impact of term-limited work contracts and precarious jobs on fertility intentions is channeled by an individual’s level of subjective well-being. To test this hypothesis, we adopt a formal framework for causal inference and apply techniques of mediation analysis to data from two rounds of the European Social Survey (ESS 2004 and 2010). Our analysis clearly suggested that the impact of employment uncertainty on fertility intentions depended on the level of subjective well-being: the negative effect was found only when subjective well-being was relatively low (i.e. life satisfaction levels equal or below 6). Detailed results show that parents and younger individuals reduced their fertility intentions more than the childless and older individuals when experiencing economic uncertainty and facing low subjective well-being. We also found that in 2010 – while the economic crisis was underway – it was especially the deterioration in men’s position in the labor market that inhibited fertility planning.

We consider the case when it is of interest to study the different states experienced over time by a set of subjects, focusing on the resulting trajectories as a whole rather than on the occurrence ofspecific events. Such situation occurs commonly in a variety of settings, for example in social and biomedical studies. Model‐based approaches, such as multistate models or Hidden Markov models, are being used increasingly to analyze trajectories and to study their relationships with a set of explanatory variables. The different assumptions underlying different models typically make the comparison of their performances difficult. In this work we introduce a novel way to accomplish this task, based on microsimulation‐based predictions. We discuss some criteria to evaluate one model and/or to compare competing models with respect to their ability to generate trajectories similar to the observed ones.

The general decline in alcohol and tobacco consumption among teenagers in recent years has been interpreted as a success of the European governments campaigns to increase adolescents’ awareness about the risk associated to drug use. At the same time, polydrug users – those who make use of more than one substance – are becoming a prevalent group among adolescent substance users. This evidence raises the question of whether the traditional approach to study risk perception related to substance use could be improved. Research in this field always deals with substance-specific risk perception indicators, while it lacks of a composite and synthetic measure of risk perception related to the overall attitudes towards substances use. This study explores whether there is a unique overall perception of risk associated with different legal and illegal substances use. Specifically, by making use of ESPAD data, we explore whether it is possible to derive an overall measure of attitude toward drugs consumption, by combining a set of indicators of risk perception regarding different types of substances (i.e. alcohol, tobacco, cannabis and other illegal drugs) and different frequencies of use (i.e. sporadic versus regular). Factor analysis results provide evidence of the existence of three indexes of perceived risk associated, respectively, to the use of legal drugs, the sporadic use of illegal drugs and the regular use of illegal drugs.

We study the educational choices of children of immigrants in a tracked school system. We first show that immigrant boys in Italy enroll disproportionately into vocational high schools, as opposed to technical and academically-oriented high schools, compared to natives of similar ability. Immigrant girls, instead, choose similar schools as native ones. We then estimate the impact of a large-scale, randomized intervention providing tutoring and career counseling to high-ability immigrant students. Male treated students increase their probability of enrolling into the high track to the same level of natives, also closing the gap in terms of grade retention. There are no significant effects on immigrant females, who exhibit similar choices and performance as native ones in absence of the intervention. Increases in academic motivation and the resulting changes in teachers’ recommendation regarding high school choice explain a sizable portion of the effect, while the effect of increases in cognitive skills is negligible. Finally, we find positive spillovers on immigrant classmates of treated students, while there is no effect on native classmates.

This paper investigates the effect of using mobile money technology on children’s school participation in low-income societies. We argue that, by reducing transaction costs, and by making it easier and less expensive to receive remittances, mobile money technology reduces the need for coping strategies that are detrimental to child development, such as withdrawing children from school and sending them to work. We test this hypothesis using a set of comparative samples from seven low-income countries. We find that mobile money technology increases the chances of children attending school. This finding is robust to the use of estimation techniques that deal with possible endogeneity issues. We also show that the effect of mobile money is mainly driven by African countries and that, at least for girls, it is significantly higher when the household is living below the poverty line.

There is a growing concern that the widespread use of computers, mobile phones and other digital devices before bedtime disrupts our sleep with detrimental effects on our health and cognitive performance. High-speed Internet promotes the use of electronic devices, video games and Internet addiction (e.g., online games and cyberloafing). Exposure to artificial light from tablets and PCs can alterate individuals’ sleep patterns. However, there is little empirical evidence on the causal relationship between technology use near bedtime and sleep. This paper studies the causal effects of access to high-speed Internet on sleep. We first show that playing video games, using PC or smartphones, watching TV or movies are correlated with shorter sleep duration. Second, we exploit historical differences in pre-existing telephone infrastructure that affected the deployment of high-speed Internet across Germany (see Falck et al., 2014) to identify a source of plausibly exogenous variation in access to Broadband. Using this instrumental variable strategy, we find that DSL access reduces sleep duration and sleep satisfaction.