1,720,987 research outputs found
The effectiveness of incentives to postpone retirement: evidence from Italy
No full textThis paper investigates whether financial incentives may be used as an effective device to induce workers to postpone retirement by evaluating the Italian so-called 'super-bonus' reform. The bonus consisted of economic incentives given for a limited period to private sector workers who had reached the requirements for seniority pension but who chose to postpone retirement. Using data from the Bank of Italy Survey on Household Income and Wealth, this paper assesses the effect of the bonus on the decision to postpone retirement, by comparing private and public workers before and after the reform. Results suggest a 30% reduction in seniority retirement probability, despite the fact that, when changes in social security wealth are taken into account, the bonus actually provided a negative incentive for most workers. Results also suggest that the effect of the reform was driven by low-income workers. Some evidence is presented showing that liquidity constraints and financial (il)literacy may help to interpret these results
The Nativity Wealth Gap in Europe: a Matching Approach
Full text linkThis paper uses a matching method to provide an estimate of the nativity wealth gap among older households in Europe. This approach does not require imposing any functional form on wealth and avoids validity-out-of-the-support assumptions; furthermore, it allows not only the estimation of the mean of the wealth gap but also its distribution for the common-support subpopulation. The results show that on average there is a positive and significant wealth gap between natives and migrants. However, the average gap may be misleading as the distribution of the gap reveals that immigrant households in the upper part of the wealth distribution are better off, and those in the lower part of the wealth distribution are worse off, than comparable native households. A heterogeneity analysis shows the importance of origin, age at migration and citizenship status in reducing the gap. Indeed, households who migrated within Europe, those who moved at younger ages rather than as adults and those who hold the citizenship of the destination country display a wealth gap that is rather consistently lower over the entire distribution
The effectiveness of incentives to postpone retirement: evidence from Italy
No full textAbstractThis paper investigates whether financial incentives may be used as an effective device to induce workers to postpone retirement by evaluating the Italian so-called ‘super-bonus’ reform. The bonus consisted of economic incentives given for a limited period to private sector workers who had reached the requirements for seniority pension but who chose to postpone retirement. Using data from the Bank of Italy Survey on Household Income and Wealth, this paper assesses the effect of the bonus on the decision to postpone retirement, by comparing private and public workers before and after the reform. Results suggest a 30% reduction in seniority retirement probability, despite the fact that, when changes in social security wealth are taken into account, the bonus actually provided a negative incentive for most workers. Results also suggest that the effect of the reform was driven by low-income workers. Some evidence is presented showing that liquidity constraints and financial (il)literacy may help to interpret these results.</jats:p
Decentralisation and interregional redistribution in the Italian education system
No full textThe aim of this paper is to evaluate the potential impact of the reform designed to decentralise public education in Italy, currently under discussion, on interregional redistribution. The central government has always played a prominent financial and administrative role in the provision of compulsory education in Italy. This has had a strong redistributive effect on per-capita GDP across the regions of the country. The current fiscal decentralisation reform may well involve the education sector, as regional and local authorities are granted greater autonomy with regard to the provision and funding of educational services. Starting from certain plausible assumptions regarding the forthcoming fiscal powers, decentralisation and the expenditure levels set by the central government, this paper evaluates how these changes may affect the degree of interregional redistribution accomplished by the education system
All is not lost: Organized crime and social capital formation
Full text linkWe investigate how institutional quality influences social capital by exploiting a policy designed to fight organized crime in Italy: the dismissal of city councils following criminal infiltration into local governments. To measure social capital, we employ a novel, fine-grained indicator based on Italy’s 5 per Mille provision, which allows taxpayers to allocate a portion of their income tax to non-profit organizations. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that city council dismissals lead to a significant increase in social capital. We document that the perceived strengthening of law enforcement is the primary mechanism through which city council dismissals enhance social capital
The Costs of Firm Exit and Labour Market Policies: New Evidence from Europe
No full textThe churning of firms is an inherent process of industrialized economies, which entails a high rate of job destruction. Thus, a key question is: what are the policies that minimize the costs of worker displacement due to business closure? Accordingly, this paper exploits a retrospective panel of workers in 13 European countries over the period 1985-2008 to explore the factors which shape the reemployment prospects of workers displaced due to business closure. The results suggest that higher spending on active labour market policies increases the reemployment prospects of the unemployed workers displaced by business closure, both in terms of unemployment duration and in terms of stability of reemployment. On the contrary, there is evidence of a negative and sizable impact of passive labour market policies on unemployment duration
Long-run health trends in Europe
No full textLong-run health trends are worsening for middle-aged baby-boomers in the US. In contrast to this alarming development, Abeliansky and Strulik (2019, A&S), in one of the few studies of long-term health developments in Europe, find improving health trends in Europe across a broad range of cohorts. We conducted a cohort analysis of health deficits similar to A&S but focused on middle-aged individuals. We find that the positive health trend has all but stalled for the more recent birth cohorts in Europe. Our results are robust to a large range of different definitions of the health index. We argue that the difference between A&S and our results is due to longitudinal sample selectivity bias. Our findings have implications for future public and private costs of health care, and they are relevant for the ongoing discussion on how to achieve longer healthy working lives
The effect of parental health shocks on living arrangements and employment
Full text linkThis study investigates the impacts of health shocks among older individuals on the dynamics of their living arrangements in Europe and the United States. Exploiting unpredicted health shocks, we use an event-study difference-in-differences approach to demonstrate that health shocks increase difficulties with activities of daily living and instrumental activities of daily living, thereby increasing the need for care. Our findings indicate that health shocks raise the probability of nursing home residency and co-residence with adult children by 0.7 and 1.4 percentage points in Europe, and by 2.1 and 1.8 percentage points in the U.S., respectively. Further analyses reveal that more generous long-term care public policies correlate with a higher probability of nursing home residency and a lower probability of co-residing with adult children, highlighting the significant role of public policies in household responses to health shocks. Additionally, we find that health shocks negatively impact adult children's labor supply, particularly in the U.
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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