Working papers results

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.
2018 - n° 115
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.
Arnstein Aassve, Letizia Mencarini, Francesco Chiocchio, Francesco Gandolfi, Arianna Gatta, Francesco Mattioli
2018 - n° 114
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.
Daniele Vignoli, Letizia Mencarini, Giammarco Alderotti
Keywords: Economic Uncertainty; Subjective Well-being; Fertility Intentions; Europe; Mediation Analysis; Causal Inference; Great Recession
2018 - n° 113
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.
Raffaella Piccarreta, Marco Bonetti, Stefano Lombardi
Keywords: Dissimilarity,Hidden Markov model,Interpoint distance distribution,Micro‐simulation,Multi‐state model,Optimal Matching,Sequence analysis
2017 - n° 112
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.
Nicoletta Balbo, Andrea Bonanomi, Francesca Luppi
Keywords: adolescents,drugs,Europe,perceived risk,polydrug
2017 - n° 111
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.
Michela Carlana, Eliana La Ferrara, Paolo Pinotti
Keywords: tracking,career choice,immigrants,aspirations,mentoring
2017 - n° 110
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.
Guido Alfani, Felix Schaff, Victoria Gierok
Keywords: Economic inequality; social inequality; wealth concentration; middle ages; early modern period; Germany; central Europe; plague; war; Black Death; Thirty Years’ War; poverty
2017 - n° 109
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.
Valentina Rotondi, Francesco Billari
Keywords: Mobile money,School,Child Labor,Technology,Digital,Revolution.