1,721,063 research outputs found
Discussion of: Mental health
No full textIn 2020, for the first time in history, entire countries underwent prolonged periods of stay-at-home orders, school closures and curfews. These policies contributed stress and disruption on top of the anxiety caused by the pandemic. Although most of us have experimented with these effects during the last two years, it remains difficult to precisely quantify them in the absence of systematic data on mental health.
The first important merit of Adams-Prassl, Boneva, Golin and Rauh is to collect such data for the United States. The survey they conducted in the midst of lockdowns (March–May 2020) collected detailed information for a large sample of individuals at a monthly frequency. The second important contribution of the paper is to leverage on these unique data to identify a significant impact of stay-at-home orders on mental health. The average effect across all individuals – just less than a tenth of a standard deviation of the dependent variable – masks an important heterogeneity by gender, as the effect increases to over 12% of standard deviations for females whereas it is not significantly different from zero for males. Obvious explanations, such as a greater burden from increased childcare or differential labour market effects, do not seem to explain the difference in impact between males and females. These results call for greater attention to the gender dimension of mental distress
The causes and consequences of organised crime: preliminary evidence across countries
No full textCross country evidence on the effects of organized crim
The credibility revolution in the empirical analysis of crime
No full textI review recent developments in the economic analysis of crime, focusing in particular on organized crime and corruption. I first discuss the main challenges to the empirical identification of causal relationships-namely, measurement error due to endogenous reporting of crime and the fact that randomized controlled trials are rarely an option when studying crime. I then discuss recent advancements made possible by the combination of detailed micro data and quasi-experimental methods
Immigration enforcement and crime
No full textImmigration enforcement has ambiguous implications for the crime rate of undocumented immigrants. On the one hand, expulsions reduce the pool of immigrants at risk of committing crimes, on the other they lower the opportunity cost of crime for those who are not expelled. We estimate the effect of expulsions on the crime rate of undocumented immigrants in Italy exploiting variation in enforcement toward immigrants of different nationality, due to the existence of bilateral agreements for the control of illegal migration. We find that stricter enforcement of migration policy reduces the crime rate of undocumented immigrants
The economic costs of organised crime: evidence from Southern Italy
No full textI examine the post-war economic development of two regions in southern Italy exposed to mafia activity after the 1970s and apply synthetic control methods to estimate their economic performance in the absence of organised crime. The comparison of actual and counterfactual development shows that the presence of mafia lowers GDP per capita by 16%. Evidence from electricity consumption and growth accounting suggests that lower GDP reflects a net loss of economic activity, due to the substitution of private capital with less productive public investment, rather than a mere reallocation of resources from the official to the unofficial sector
Clicking on heaven's door: the effect of immigrant legalization on crime
No full textWe estimate the effect of immigrant legalization on the crime rate of immigrants in Italy by exploiting an ideal regression discontinuity design: fixed quotas of residence permits are available each year, applications must be submitted electronically on specific ``Click Days'', and are processed on a first-come, first-served basis until the available quotas are exhausted. Matching data on applications with individual-level criminal records, we show that legalization reduces the crime rate of legalized immigrants by 0.6 percentage points on average, on a baseline crime rate of 1.1 percent
Paolo Pinotti discussion of: Immigrants' work permits
No full textThis interesting paper proposes a new mechanism for managing admission and permit rights to foreign immigrants. Such mechanism relies on anonymous matching of demand and supply of work permits by, respectively, immigrants and natives. This is the main innovation and the main advantage over previous proposals, as it would allow for greater flexibility and speed of adapting to muting conditions. At the same time, direct matching of demand and supply of permits requires the national government to relinquish sovereignty over admissions of foreign citizens in the country. Since the latter has been historically one of the main prerogatives of modern national states, political feasibility remains an open issue. Perhaps supranational authorities such as the European Union could incentivize national governments to adopt the new regime through economic subsidies or other benefits for participants.
The second main advantage of decentralized exchange is that it allows domestic workers to sell their working permits when unemployed, which may certainly help spreading the benefits from migration to a wider constituency of workers. A potential concern is that the resulting unemployment insurance would be pro-cyclical, the price of working permits decreasing in periods of high unemployment. In addition, at the global level, we would have foreign workers from poorer countries buying working permits from domestic workers in native countries, which resembles a regressive transfer scheme. However, to the extent that buyers and sellers enter voluntarily the trade and the alternative is no permit at all, the new mechanism is welfare improving
Financial Development and Pay-As-You-Go Social Security
No full textFinancial markets and pay-as-you-go social security are two alternative ways to provide for retirement. The size of social security programs could therefore be partly determined by the level of financial frictions. I explore this possibility by using legal origin as a proxy for financial frictions that may hold back financial development. The empirical analysis yields two main results. First, legal origin-driven differences in financial frictions are an important determinant of social security; in particular, common law countries exhibit significantly smaller public pension programs. Second, two-stage estimates suggest that legal origin impacts on social security through financial market development
Immigrants and crime
No full textThis ebook offers a brief summary of what economists have learnt about migration in several crucial areas of policymaking, and identifies most of the important questions that still remain to be answered
Trust, regulation and market failures
No full textGovernment regulation of firms is associated with more negative externalities and unofficial activity across countries. I argue that this correlation mainly reflects causality going from concerns about market failures to demand for government intervention. Using trust in others as a proxy for such concerns, I show that differences in trust explain a great deal of variation in entry regulations. Then, controlling for trust in the regression of market failures on regulation, the latter is no longer associated with worse economic outcomes. The same result is confirmed when I exploit country population as an alternative source of variation in regulation
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