Working papers results

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.

In this paper, we show that unemployment increases child neglect in the United States during the period from 2004 to 2012. A one percentage point increase in the unemployment rate leads to a 20 percent increase in neglect. We identify this effect by instrumenting for the county-level unemployment rate with a Bartik instrument, which we create as the weighted average of the national-level unemployment rates across each of twenty industries, where the weights are the county-level fraction of the employed working-age population in each industry at the start of the sample period. An important mechanism behind this effect is that parents lack social and private safety nets. The effect on neglect is smaller in states that introduce longer extensions to unemployment benefits, and is greater in counties where an initially larger fraction of children are not covered by health insurance. We find no evidence that the effect is driven by alcohol consumption or divorce.

The spread of high-speed Internet epitomizes the digital revolution, affecting several aspects of our life. Using German panel data, we test whether the availability of broadband Internet influences fertility choices in a low-fertility setting, which is well-known for the difficulty to combine work and family life. We exploit a strategy devised by Falck et al. (2014) to obtain causal estimates of the impact of broadband on fertility. We find positive effects of high-speed Internet availability on the fertility of high-educated women aged 25 and above. Effects are not statistically significant both for men, low-educated women, and under 25. We also show that broadband access significantly increases the share of women reporting teleworking or part-time working. Furthermore, we find positive effects on time spent with children and overall life satisfaction. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that high-speed Internet allows high-educated women to conciliate career and motherhood, which may promote fertility with a “digital divide”. At the same time, higher access to information on the risks and costs of early pregnancy and childbearing may explain the negative effects on younger adults.

Although the European Union allows citizens from member countries to migrate freely within its confines to facilitate integration, it may be alienating public support for Europe. This paper investigates this by extending group threat theory to explain how internal migration influences mass public support using annual data from 1998 to 2014 across 15 Western European countries. We find that increases in the presence of foreigners from new member countries in Central and Eastern Europe have raised collective concerns about EU membership and there is some evidence that it may have eroded trust in European institutions as well. The results also show that this effect is exacerbated during an economic downturn. Our findings imply that collective opinion has responded ‘rationally’ to contextual changes in Europe’s internal migration patterns. The study concludes by discussing how group threat theory is relevant for understanding collective sentiment about the European Union.

Political disaffection has intensified in democratic societies and European countries have witnessed a slow but steady decline of political trust over the past decades. We argue that this is due to, in part, to sustained immigration and was exacerbated by the onset of the global financial crisis. To test this, we employ a multi-level research design using micro attitudinal data from 17 European countries (2002-14). Our findings show a strong connection between immigration to Europe and the growing distrust that European citizens have for their country’s political institutions. This study provides new insight into how trends in immigration and the economic conditions of the last decade have reshaped the relationship between citizens and politics in Europe. Finally, the future implications for sociological theorizing around political trust is discussed.

We investigate the role of individual labor income as a moderator of parental subjective well-being trajectories before and after the first childbirth in Germany, a very low fertility country. Analyzing German Socioeconomic Panel Survey data, we found that income matters negatively for parental subjective well-being after childbirth, though with important differences by education and gender. In particular, among better educated parents, the richer see the arrival of a child more negatively. These findings contribute to the debate on the relationship between income and fertility adding information on how parents perceive the birth of a child beyond the strict financial cost of childbearing and raising. Results are discussed in terms of preferences among different groups of parents, costs of children, and work and family balance. Results are robust to potential endogeneity between income and childbirth, as well as for alternative measures of income.

The history of prices has played a key role in the economic history of the preindustrial world. In this field, Allen’s paper (2001) set a milestone by proposing the calculation of a welfare ratio that would allow a comparison among different areas of the world and different times. Nevertheless, we consider that this method as is has reached its limits and needs major improvements. We therefore propose a change of scope that would allow the establishment of the real consumption-possibility frontier of families—the actual unit of production and consumption in Early Modern times. We also revise the barebone baskets that have been used until now, replacing them with consumer baskets that approach, to a greater degree, the true consumption patterns of different kinds of families. By focusing on two widely documented cases—Madrid and Mexico City—we conclude, first, that consumers had regular access to a wider array of products than previously assumed; second, that in the 18th century prices evolved in Madrid in a relatively similar way to the large cities of Western Europe, even if Madrid constituted an exception in the Castilian context, where inflation was more intense during the second half of the aforementioned century; and, third, that volatility in the consumer price index was around 10% higher for unskilled workers than for skilled workers. However, the volatility deduced from our price indices is significantly lower than the one calculated using the typical barebone method.