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The Italian legislation provides a two-term limits for mayors, but it allows term limited mayors to pass on the torch to their deputies as candidates for mayorship. We exploit this feature of the electoral system to design a novel identification strategy for separating ‘accountability’ (the difference in performance between two politicians facing different incentives in terms of reelections) and ‘competence’ (the difference in performance between two politicians with different experience in policy making). Using a panel of 1,203 Italian municipalities, from 1998 to 2006, we find a significant role for competence but not for accountability on municipal spending. Specifically, second-and-last-term mayors, and first-term mayors with previous experience as executive officers, spend less, on average, than inexperienced first-term mayors. We also discuss the policy implications of this finding.

L’obiettivo delle riflessioni è quello di chiarire quali sono i potenziali ostacoli per l’attuazione della riforma della sanità territoriale disegnata dal DM 77/2022.

We compare the intergovernmental health system responses to the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy and Spain, two countries where healthcare is managed at the regional level and the impact of the first wave was highly localized. However, whereas in Italy the regional government allowed for a passively accepted central level of coordination without restricting autonomy ("descentralised coordinantion"), in Spain, the healthcare system was de facto centralized under a "single command" ("hierarchical centralization"). We argue that the latter strategy crowded out incentives for information sharing, experimentation and regional participation in decision-making. This article documents evidence of important differences in health outcomes (infected cases and deaths) and outputs (regular and emergency hospital admissions) between the two countries, both at the national and regional levels. We then discuss several potential mechanisms to account for these differences. We find that given the strong localized impact of the pandemic, allowing more autonomy in Italy (compared to centralized governance in Spain) can explain some cross-country differences in outcomes and outputs.

Multigrading represents the practice of mixing children of different ages in the same classroom. This paper examines the effect of attending a multigrade class in Grade 2 on students' academic achievement in Grades 2, 5, and 8, respectively, considering Italy as a case study. To address the issue of endogeneity of multigrading (and class size), we adopt an IV identification strategy based on a law that disciplines class composition. We show that multigrading has a positive (16 percent of a standard deviation) short-term effect on academic achievements. However, this effect diminishes over time and becomes negative (-10 percent of a standard deviation) if students spend several years in a multigrade class. Mechanism analysis indicates the fundamental role of teachers and suggests that the negative long-term effect of multigrading is not statistically different from zero when multigrade classes are taught by more experienced teachers. These findings, based on longitudinal data, reconcile contrasting results in the literature, which are based on cross-sectional data and on the short-term effects of multigrading.

We study how multigrading, which is mixing students of different grades into a single class, affects children’s cognitive achievement in primary school. We build instruments to identify the causal effect of multigrading by exploiting an Italian law that controls class size and grade composition. Results suggest that attendance in multigrade versus single-grade classes increases students’ performance on standardized tests by 19 percent of a standard deviation for second graders, and it has zero effect for fifth graders. The positive impact of multigrading for second graders appears to be driven by children sharing their class with peers from higher grades. This last finding rationalizes the absence of a multigrade effect for fifth graders.

In this paper, we provide an estimate of the impact of money laundering on residential house market prices. The housing market is commonly exploited by criminal organizations to clean illegal profits. The increase in demand due to money laundering contrasts the negative externality of crime on house prices, which has been investigated by a large literature. We build a new dataset on residential house prices at the provincial level in Italy over the period 2005-2012, obtaining a sample of 672 observations. We then estimate a hedonic equilibrium price model, controlling for proxies both for illegal profits derived from "entrepreneurial" crimes (drug dealing, receiving stolen goods, prostitution) and for violent crimes (extortions), together with traditional market drivers. Adding to the evidence from the traditional literature, which remarks the negative impact of crime on house prices, our findings suggest that money laundering from "entrepreneurial" crimes creates an upward distortion in the housing market prices. The impact is stronger where retail markets for illicit trades are richer.

We experimentally investigate the link between individuals' value on future incomes and their support for redistributive policies today. The investigation identifies time preferences as a key driver of redistributive pol-icies via their effect on personal responsibility, defined as costly but productive effort. The investigation also accounts for the strategic interplay between individuals in the choice of effort, identifying two key strategies: either exercise more effort and ask for less redistribution or free ride on others' efforts, asking for more redis-tribution. We find that individuals oriented toward the future tend to invest more and ask for less redistribution. We discuss the policy implications of this result.

Il concentra l’attenzione sui neonati, dalla nascita fino al compimento del primo anno di vita, per studiare la possibile eterogeneità nell’accesso a servizi appropriati di PS tra figli di nativi e figli di immigrati. Nel capitolo si analizza l’inappropriatezza e di alcuni possibili meccanismi esplicativi, senza tracciare poi gli effetti sulla salute futura dei bambini per la mancanza di dati longitudinali che consentano di seguire i neonati nel tempo.

Dopo due anni di pandemia, l’Italia si ritrova con un debito pubblico di oltre 2.700 miliardi di euro, il 155% del PIL, il livello più alto in perio­do di pace mai accumulato dal Paese. Sono più di 45.000 euro a testa per italiano, infanti com­presi. Come ci siamo arrivati? Che conseguenze ha un debito così alto sul funzionamento dell’economia? Dobbiamo preoccuparcene? E soprattutto, come possiamo uscirne? Per rispondere bisogna anzitutto capire cos’è davvero il debito pubblico, a cosa serve, cosa ne garantisce la sostenibilità nel tempo. E per far­lo occorre anche chiarire come siamo arrivati a questo punto, tra la visione corta dei governan­ti e la furbizia sciocca dei governati, aggravate dalle inefficienti dinamiche politico-istituzionali. Dopo aver discusso criticamente le soluzioni fa­cili e apparentemente indolori al problema, così popolari sui social (a cominciare dal ripudio del debito, la sua ristrutturazione, l’uscita dall’euro e le possibili patrimoniali, per finire con il sogno della monetizzazione perpetua, l’equivalente moderno dalla manna biblica), nel saggio Debito pubblico Massimo Bordignon e Gilberto Turati suggeri­scono una via d’uscita per il futuro. Perché se è vero che il mostro è brutto, non è però imbatti­bile. Sempre che si voglia batterlo. Viviamo in un mondo strutturalmente diverso dal passato e i tassi di interesse resteranno bas­si per lungo tempo. Questo offre la possibilità di ridurre significativamente il peso del debito italiano a costi limitati. Ma va ritrovata la strada della crescita, sfruttando gli spazi offerti dalle nuove politiche europee e avviando la realizza­zione delle molte riforme di cui il Paese necessita da tempo. Un’opportunità unica che sarebbe im­perdonabile non cogliere.

Noninvasive prenatal screening tests help identify genetic disorders in a fetus, but their take-up remains low in several countries. Using a regression discontinuity design, we test the causal effect of a policy that eliminated co-payments for noninvasive screening tests in Italy. We identify the treatment effects by a discontinuity in women's eligibility for a free test based on their conception date. We find that the policy increases the probability of women's undergoing noninvasive screening tests by 5.5 percentage points, and the effect varies by socioeconomic status. We do not find evidence of substitution effects with more expensive and riskier invasive diagnostic tests. In addition, the increase in take-up does not affect pregnancy termination or newborn health. We find some evidence of positive effects on mothers’ health behaviors during pregnancy as measured by reductions in mothers’ weight gain and hospital admissions during pregnancy, but these are statistically significant only at the 10 percent level.

We study whether, alongside with an explicit tracking system separating students in general versus vocational curricula typical in European countries, the Italian highly centralised public schooling is also characterised by another implicit tracking system, typical of the US, separating students mostly by ability and income within the same track. We pursue this aim by considering the municipality of Turin, a post-industrialised urban context in Northern Italy. We proxy students’ ability and skills with the score obtained at the standardised admission test at the School of Economics and Business of the local university. We find evidence of heterogeneity across tracks and schools within the same track, which suggests that the inequality patterns common in the Italian schooling system are affected by both types of tracking. We then discuss the potential sources of this US-style tracking, namely self-selection of better students in better schools, observed and unobserved school characteristics and income stratification. As for the role of income, we find limited evidence of residential segregation, but students from better socio-economic backgrounds travel more, exploiting information on school quality.