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The aim of this short communication is to estimate the effects of the implementation of more restrictive lockdown measures on pollution levels in Italy. Using a time series of weekly concentrations of PM10, PM2.5 and NO2 for the period 2016–2020 across 71 provinces, we find that the introduction of lockdown measures reduced the air concentration levels of PM10 and NO2 by 17–18%, while their effect on PM2.5 remains unclear. These results indicate that the lockdown had a significant positive impact in terms of lives saved and improved air quality.

Geography and the quality of the environment may have long lasting effects on the living standards of individuals and this, in its turn, may affect even substantially the distribution of income and regional disparities. In this paper I consider malaria as a measure of “bad geography” and propose some evidence showing that it was a major determinant of the health of individuals (as measured by the height of conscripts) and its disparities between individuals and regions in Italy. In particular, to estimate the relationship between malaria exposure and height, I rely on the “fetal origins hypothesis”, that is I hypothesize that exposure to malaria in utero or during childhood has persistent effects on health. Periods under scrutiny in this paper are the last two decades of the XIX century, a period without major public health interventions, and the years around the eradication era in the 1950s. My results support the hypothesis that geographically targeted policies may reduce health inequality between regions and within regions.

This article aims to analyse the effects of plague on the long‐term development of Italian cities, with particular attention to the 1629–30 epidemic. By using a new dataset on plague mortality rates in 56 cities covering the period c. 1575–1700, an economic geography model verifying the existence of multiple equilibria is estimated. It is found that cities severely affected by the 1629–30 plague were displaced to a lower growth path. It is also found that plague caused long‐lasting damage to the size of Italian urban populations and to urbanization rates. These findings support the hypothesis that seventeenth‐century plagues played a fundamental role in triggering the process of relative decline of the Italian economies.

This paper aims to evaluate the effects of a road pricing scheme in Milan (the Ecopass) on accidents. As the policy was introduced in January 2008, we exploit this exogenous variation to analyse the trend of the time series of the number of accidents, the number of injuries and deaths and in different areas through a regression discontinuity design approach. We find evidence of an overall reduction in accidents in the whole city ( $$-$$ 16 %), with a more pronounced effect in the treated area ( $$-$$ 18.8 %). The effect on severity of accidents is limited as only a significant reduction in the number of injuries could be detected, whereas no effect was found for the number of deaths.

Malaria is thought to be strictly related to underdevelopment and poverty, and its geographically related origin is now widely recognized. That is, it is endemic only in certain areas of the globe, with environmental and climatic characteristics that are ideal for the proliferation of mosquitoes, which are the vector for transmitting the disease. This feature is the main reason why a large body of economic literature uses mortality from malaria as a proxy with which to measure the effect of geography on human outcomes. Cases of eradication are being scrutinized by scholars to determine the socioeconomic impacts of malaria. Among the various malaria parasites, the worst, Plasmodium falciparum, infested Italian regions for centuries until its eradication in the period 1945-50. This article presents an empirical assessment of the economic outcomes of the eradication of malaria in the Italian regions by exploiting the spatial variation in mortality rates. I found support for the hypothesis that the eradication of malaria increases human capital in the long run. In particular, I found that eradication increased the years of schooling by about 0.3 years, although my evidence suggests a greater effect on males than on females. Moreover, I found support for a long-run impact of eradication actions that operated through an intergenerational spillover effect and accounted for about 0.07 years of schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transport costs are widely considered as a key driver of competitive advantage of countries, regions and cities. Their relevance is even greater when scale economies are at work since production is concentrated and goods must be shipped. Recent literature has found that highways, by decreasing transport costs, are crucial in influencing agglomeration economies and ultimately urban development. In this article, we contribute to this literature by studying the effect of highway construction on the structure of local economies. In particular, we consider the effect of highways in Italian cities in terms of firm location by explicitly recognizing the pivotal role played by the transport sector and by intersectoral linkages in promoting development. The main research hypothesis is that the location of an highway exit in a given city attracts firms operating in the transport service sector and consequently transport-intensive firms. Our empirical evidence concerns Italian cities over the period 1951–2001 and exploits variation in employment, population and plants induced by the construction of the highway network. To deal with the endogeneity of the geography of highways exits, we propose as an instrument the geography of Roman roads. To this end, we have coded the whole network of Roman roads in Italy. We have found that the location of highway exits increases employment and the number of plants and that this growth is concentrated in transport service-intensive sectors. This result is robust to a number of checks, including eventual instrument non-validity and selection into treatment.

The accuracy of ex ante project appraisal has been subject to scrutiny by scholars in recent years. It has often been claimed that the inaccuracy of project evaluation leads to a waste of public spending. In this article I acknowledge that the appraisal of a project consists in long-run predictions of several variables, so that the accuracy of ex ante evaluations should be assessed on the basis of forecasting rationality. I test for the rationality of a sample of World Bank project appraisals and find no significant discrepancy between ex ante and realized rates of return.

In this note we discuss the sensitivity analysis of the internal rates of return (IRR). We show that the use of partial derivatives can be misleading in the identification of key drivers of an investment project's performance. To remedy this shortcoming, we propose the use of an alternative sensitivity measure called the Differential Importance Measure. The analysis shows that, even if the theoretical conditions for using the Net Present Value or the IRR as valuation criteria apply, the sensitivity analysis results for the two indicators may differ.

The aim of this note is to introduce the special issue on "Mega-projects and regional development in the Italian experience" and to review some of the critical issues associated with the evaluation of mega-projects. In particular, we focus on the shortcomings of Cost-Benefit Analysis when the project is large and when network effects are not negligible, and we propose further research on risk assessment and time discounting for long term and risky investments. Lo scopo della presente nota e quello di introdurre i saggi della special issue "Megaprogetti e sviluppo regionale nell’esperienza italiana" e porre in rassegna alcune delle tematiche principali, spesso associate alle grandi infrastrutture. In particolare, presenteremo alcune delle problematiche inerenti l’Analisi Costi-Benefici nel caso dei grandi progetti di investimento con rilevanti effetti di rete. Proporremo altresi delle direzioni di possibile ricerca futura in materia di valutazione dei rischi e di funzioni di sconto per il lungo periodo.

In this article, we present the results from a meta-analysis conducted over 44 experimental and field studies, which report individual discount rate estimates. We find in our research that the experimental design of a study has a decisive impact on these estimates, and conclude that meta-analysis, in the case of individual discount rates, has a low transfer value. © 2009 Taylor & Francis.

European regions have experienced a greater presence of service producers in their economy over the last few decades. Indeed, the manufacturing sector increasingly contracts out many activities to intermediate producer services. This is mostly because they are located close to each other and because services experience increasing returns to scale which reduce their marginal costs. In this paper, we propose to measure the extent to which productivity in services has converged across European regions. The model we use, originally developed by Verdoorn (1949), takes the increasing returns to scale explicitly into account. We apply spatial econometric techniques and control for border effects by introducing two different spatial weights matrices under the assumption that economic interactions decrease very substantially when a national border is passed. Furthermore, we take proper care of the presence of both types (spatial and non-spatial) of endogeneity by using spatial two stages least squares (Kelejian an...

The investment decisions of individuals are influenced by their perception of risk. The article investigates from an empirical viewpoint the role of risk aversion and of local government as a provider of public services in shaping the decisions of individuals to subscribe to private pension plans. It finds that risk aversion is a relatively important factor in the pension funds subscription decision, and that the greater the provision of local social services, the lower the probability of subscription.

This article aims at analysing the effect of temporal aggregation in space–time autoregressive models. By means of a simulation experiment, it is shown that, the greater the spatial dependence in time series, the lower the bias due to temporal aggregation. However, the ratio between the average mean squared forecasting errors for daily data and that for yearly data seems to decrease for high parameter values.

This paper studies the effect of homeownership on saving preferences of individuals by eliciting answers to a direct question on desired precautionary saving, collected on a representative sample of the Italian population. We have found no evidence for a direct impact of homeownership, whereas we have found a strong and positive impact of housing prices volatility on saving preferences of homeowner.

Sensitivity analysis has become an important tool to test the robustness of estimated economic models. In this paper we propose the use of simulation-based sensitivity analysis to identify the fundamental structure of the economy. To show the possibilities of this technique, we provide empirical evidence on the path of structural change occurring in the Chicago economy by running simulations for projected input–output tables over the period 1975–2010.

In the knowledge era, the importance of highly-qualified human capital has been widely recognized as a key factor for local economic development, especially for those areas specialized in science and technology (S&T). Assuming a regional perspective, the capacity to attract this kind of people is both a sign of territorial competitiveness and a way to further reinforce this by boosting the quality of the local labour market in a self-reinforcing process. In line with this perspective, universities play a fundamental role because they can attract students from elsewhere, and then provide local firms with qualified workers. On the other hand, this process is particularly detrimental for territories suffering ‘brain drain’. This paper aims to show this process of selective migration in the case of Italian S&T university students. Specifically, we use a spatial gravity model to show that university students move from Southern towards Northern regions to study in S&T universities, and this mechanism is driven by the dynamism of local labour markets, and not just by the quality of universities. In our view, these results are supportive of the hypothesis that skill-biased migration occurs also very early in the lives of migrants, i.e., at the time they choose university.

A wealth of literature has focused on the effectiveness of cohesion policy for regional development. However, most studies have neglected the heterogeneous nature of such interventions. In this article, we study such heterogeneity by identifying different development strategies put in place by regional governments. In particular, by using expenditure allocation by region and by item over the period 2000–2006, we identify regions with similar development strategies. Moreover, we find that policy performance is not correlated to the strategy chosen, rather it depends on the country to which the region belongs. Copyright 2013, Oxford University Press.