1,720,980 research outputs found
Equality of Opportunity: Welfare and Public Policies
No full textThis chapter is devoted to discussing the relationship that exists between welfare and public policy through the measurement of inequality. Our narrative outlines how setting the right policy to increase welfare must necessarily come through a multidimensional assessment of inequality. In recent years, a thoughtful frontier of inequality measurement has proposed an analysis of inequality of opportunity to understand and study the differences that exist between and within countries. We aim at discussing how the study of inequality measurement is essential for understanding the channels that contribute to making the income distribution much more unfair over time. For this, we argue on the main methodologies proposed in the literature − discussed in a straightforward manner – both from a theoretical and empirical view. In particular, the empirical illustration through EU-SILC data can help to understand how important such a pathway can be to capture as much as possible the effects on welfare
Explaining anti-immigrant sentiment through spatial analysis: a study of the 2019 European elections in Italy
Full text linkDoes the settling of foreigners cause a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment due to resource competition? Or does the interaction allow for more respectful relations? And what if one also considers settlement in neighbouring municipalities? Applying an instrumental variable approach to variables collected at the municipality level and also including neighbouring areas, this paper aims to shed light on these questions by considering the vote for the Lega party across Italian municipalities in the 2019 European parliamentary election as a proxy for anti-immigration sentiment. Our results point out a negative effect of direct interactions with foreigners on the Lega vote, while the proximity of immigrants in neighbouring municipalities could have the opposite effect
Adams and Eves: The Gender Gap in Economics Majors
Full text linkWe 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 eect 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
Does working from home increase the gender wage gaps? Insights from an Italian survey of occupations
No full textInter-municipal cooperation as a solution for public services delivery? The case of Unioni di Comuni in Emilia-Romagna Region
Full text linkInter municipal cooperation (IMC) represents a solution adopted all around the world in order to jointly provide services considering the complexity of contemporary socio-economic contexts. However, empirical evidence on IMC solutions is still week. The purpose of this paper is to analyse associations of municipalities (Unioni di Comuni, UC), the prevalent kind of IMC established in Italy, as a possible solution for sustainable public services delivery. Our research questions refer to the main features of Unioni di Comuni as an IMC for public services delivery in EmiliaRomagna Region (Italy), to the explanation of those characteristics, and to the evaluation of UCs and their features in terms of autonomy, resilience and sustainability. In order to meet our objectives, we accomplished a cluster analysis, considering administrative and socio-economic data; in addition, we examined specific characteristics within each cluster to proceed with a comparison between clusters in terms of revenues from transfers from other governments layers, own revenues, current expenses and financial autonomy index in the last years. Our results suggest a general tendency: to provide services through UC in E-R; and to enhance their development in terms of public service specialization. But at the same time, UCs generally decreased their own financial autonomy, relying on transfers from other public institutions. In line with Resource-Dependence Theory (RDT), our empirical analysis finds different clusters of UCs which act as new centres for public service delivery in Emilia-Romagna Region in order to reduce uncertainty over resources through the creation of new inter-institutional balances. However, the statement that strong UCs compensate weak starting territorial features of municipalities is not self-evident
Istruzione terziaria e finanziamenti pubblici: un’opportunità di crescita?
Full text linkLuca Bonacini, Giuseppe Pignataro e Cristina Specchi in relazione alle politiche universitarie, centrali anche per il PNRR, sottolineano l’importanza di un loro orientamento ad accrescere l’attrattività dell’università e, in questa prospettiva, della riduzione del divario tra Nord e Sud, tra centro e periferia
Identifying policy challenges of COVID-19 in hardly reliable data and judging the success of lockdown measures
No full textIdentifying structural breaks in the dynamics of COVID-19 contagion is crucial to promptly assess policies and evaluate the effectiveness of lockdown measures. However, official data record infections after a critical and unpredictable delay. Moreover, people react to the health risks of the virus and also anticipate lockdowns. All of this makes it complex to quickly and accurately detect changing patterns in the virus’s infection dynamic. We propose a machine learning procedure to identify structural breaks in the time series of COVID-19 cases. We consider the case of Italy, an early-affected country that was unprepared for the situation, and detect the dates of structural breaks induced by three national lockdowns so as to evaluate their effects and identify some related policy issues. The strong but significantly delayed effect of the first lockdown suggests a relevant announcement effect. In contrast, the last lockdown had significantly less impact. The proposed methodology is robust as a real-time procedure for early detection of the structural breaks: the impact of the first two lockdowns could have been correctly identified just the day after they actually occurred
Does Working from Home Increase the Gender Wage Gap? Insights from an Italian Survey of Occupations
No full textThis article investigates to what extent the working from home (WFH) feasibility of occupations can influence the gender wag gap (GWG) at the mean and along the wage distribution. Based on Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions and unconditional quantile regressions, results show that the GWG is greater among women working in an occupation with a high level of WFH feasibility. We find evidence of both sticky floor and glass ceiling effects for employees with high WFH feasibility and only a sticky floor effect for the group with low WFH feasibility. The positive association revealed between the level of WFH feasibility and the GWG appears particularly strong among older and married women employees. These results underscore that the WFH feasibility may play an important role in exacerbating future gender gaps in wages, as WFH is expected to remain a normal practice beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.HIGHLIGHTS Working from home (WFH) feasibility of occupations influences the gender wage gap (GWG) in Italy.GWG is overall wider among employees with high WFH feasibility than employees with low WFH feasibility.The GWG is higher among older and married women employees.A possible explanation is Italy's ungenerous work-family policies and poor childcare availability.There is a need for policies aimed at regulating WFH from a gender-equality perspective
Choose the school, choose the performance. New evidence on the determinants of student performance in eight European countries
Full text linkThis study aims to identify the main determinants of student performance in reading and
maths across eight European Union countries (Austria, Croatia, Germany, Hungary, Italy,
Portugal, Slovakia, and Slovenia). Based on student-level data from the OECD’s PISA
2018 survey and by means of the application of efficient algorithms, we highlight that the
number of books at home and a variable combining the type and location of their school
represent the most important predictors of student performance in all of the analysed
countries, while other school characteristics are rarely relevant. Econometric results show
that students attending vocational schools perform significantly worse than those in
general schools, except in Portugal. Considering only general school students, the
differences between big and small cities are not statistically significant, while among
students in vocational schools, those in a small city tend to perform better than those in a
big city. Through the Gelbach decomposition method, which allows measuring the
relative importance of observable characteristics in explaining a gap, we show that the
differences in test scores between big and small cities depend on school characteristics,
while the differences between general and vocational schools are mainly explained by
family social statu
Coronavirus pandemic, remote learning and emerging education inequalities
Full text linkRecent studies predict that the school closures and distance learning of the 2020 pandemic will lead to lower average education levels, but they may also result into greater and new education inequalities. Using PISA 2018 data from France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom, we find that, even before the pandemic, students lacking the resources needed to learn remotely – ICT resources at home, at school or a quiet place to study – experience strong and significant cognitive gaps with respect to their peers that, in mathematics, range from 70 percent of a school year in the United Kingdom, Germany and France to 25 percent in Spain. Gaps in reading are similar. With school closures and remote learning, these cognitive losses are predicted to increase. We find similar results by considering days of absence from school. In the longer run, students in Spain, Germany and Italy who cannot learn remotely are more likely to repeat grades and end their education early. Overall, cognitive gaps and school dropouts driven by a lack of ICT resources vary with countries’ educational systems and digital divides. Policies should aim to enhance the use of digital resources in education, and must be designed according to countries’ characteristics
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