Working papers results

2018 - n° 126
If individuals become aware of their stereotypes, do they change their behavior? We study this question in the context of teachers’ bias in grading immigrants and native children in middle schools. Teachers give lower grades to immigrant students compared to natives who have the same performance on standardized, blindly-graded tests. We then relate differences in grading to teachers’ stereotypes, elicited through an Implicit Association Test (IAT). We find that math teachers with stronger stereotypes give lower grades to immigrants compared to natives with the same performance. Literature teachers do not differentially grade immigrants based on their own stereotypes. Finally, we share teachers’ own IAT score with them, randomizing the timing of disclosure around the date on which they assign term grades. All teachers informed of their stereotypes before term grading increase grades assigned to immigrants. Revealing stereotypes may be a powerful intervention to decrease discrimination, but it may also induce a reaction from individuals who were not acting in a biased way.
Alberto Alesina, Michela Carlana, Eliana La Ferrara, Paolo Pinotti
Keywords: immigrants,teachers,implicit stereotypes,IAT,bias in grading
2018 - n° 125
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.
Pietro Battiston, Simona Gamba, Matteo Rizzolli, Valentina Rotondi
Keywords: Public goods,lab-in-the-field experiment,cooperation,group,behavior,community,indivisibility
2018 - n° 124
The stock market influences some of the most fundamental economic decisions of investors, such as consumption, saving, and labor supply, through the financial wealth channel. This paper provides evidence that daily fluctuations in the stock market have important–and hitherto neglected–spillover effects in another, unrelated domain, namely driving. Using the universe of fatal road car accidents in the United States from 1990 to 2015, we find that a one standard deviation reduction in daily stock market returns is associated with a 0.5% increase in the number of fatal accidents. A battery of falsification tests support a causal interpretation of this finding. Our results are consistent with immediate emotions stirred by a negative stock market performance influencing the number of fatal accidents, in particular among inexperienced investors, thus highlighting the broader economic and social consequences of stock market fluctuations.
Corrado Giulietti, Mirco Tonin, Michael Vlassopoulos.
Keywords: stock market,car accidents,emotions.
2018 - n° 123
How does pay-for-performance (P4P) impact productivity, multitasking, and the composition of workers in mission-oriented jobs? These are central issues in sectors like education or healthcare. We conduct a laboratory experiment, manipulating compensation and mission, to answer these questions. We find that P4P has positive effects on productivity on the incentivized dimension of effort and negative effects on the non-incentivized dimension for workers in non-mission-oriented treatments. In mission-oriented treatments, P4P generates minimal change on either dimension. Participants in the non-mission sector – but not in the mission-oriented treatments – sort on ability, with lower ability workers opting out of the P4P scheme.
Daniel Jones, Mirco Tonin, Michael Vlassopoulos.
Keywords: Prosocial motivation,Performance pay,Multitasking,Sorting
2018 - n° 122
Public procurement outcomes depend on the ability of the procuring agency to select well-performing suppliers. Should public administrations be granted more or less discretion in their decision making? Using Italian data on municipal public works tendered in the period 2009-2013, we study how a reform extending the scope of bureaucrat discretion affects supplier selection. We find that the share of contracts awarded to politically connected firms increases while the (ex-ante) labor productivity of the winning firm decreases, thus suggesting a potential misallocation of the public funds. These effects are concentrated among lower quality procuring agencies.
Audinga Baltrunaite, Cristina Giorgiantonio, Sauro Mocetti and Tommaso Orlando.
Keywords: discretion,supplier selection,public procurement,transparency,corruption.
2018 - n° 120
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.
Arnstein Aassve, Francesca Luppi, Letizia Mencarini.
Keywords: life satisfaction,domains of satisfaction,childbearing,longitudinal analysis.
2018 - n° 119
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.
Tommaso Autorino, Francesco Mattioli, Letizia Mencarini.
2018 - n° 118
According to the existing theoretical literature, there are several channels through which privatization of State-owned enterprises and assets may shape the distribution of income, either increasing or decreasing the level of inequality. Assessing the actual distributional impact of privatization becomes therefore an empirical matter. This paper is a first attempt to empirically investigate the relationship between privatization and income inequality through redistribution, focusing on the role of democratic institutions in developing countries. Using an unbalanced panel of low and middle-countries in the period 1988-2008, we find that an increase in privatization revenue is negatively and significantly correlated with net-income inequality when democratic institutions are well consolidated. All the robustness checks we perform confirm this finding. Thus, our analysis seems to suggest that, in developing countries, policy makers’s choice of implementing divestiture programs while democratizing at the same time may lead to an improvement in income equality.
Lidia Ceriani, Simona Scabrosetti, Francesco Scervini.
Keywords: Inequality,Democracy,Privatization,Developing countries
2018 - n° 117
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.
Letizia Mencarini, Delia Irazú Hernández-Farías, Mirko Lai, Viviana Patti, Emilio Sulis, Daniele Vignoli.
Keywords: sentiment analysis,social media,fertility,parenthood,subjective well-being,linguistic corpora.
2018 - n° 116
We examine the causal effect of legislative activity on private benefits, which have been largely neglected by previous research in legislative studies. By relying on a natural experiment in New Zealand, where randomly selected MPs are given the opportunity to propose legislation, we find evidence for a causal relation between proposing a (successful) bill and the private benefits MPs receive, in terms of gifts and payments for services. We conclude that the allocation of private benefits depends on legislative performance.
Massimo Morelli, Moritz Osnabrügge, Matia Vannoni.
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