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After the pandemic peak, public debt over GDP in Italy has fallen sharply thanks to high real and nominal economic growth; a few institutional changes have further reduced concerns about its medium-term sustainability. Yet, the debt ratio is still too high and needs to be reduced. The gradual adjustment path forecasted by the new Eu fiscal rules seems broadly able to reach this objective without imposing too harsh policies that might turn out to be economically and politically counter-productive. Still, without a serious reform of the Eu and the Eu budget, there remains the problem of how Italy and the other European countries will finance the new spending priorities dictated by the green deal and the mutated geo-political situation. And in the longer run, the demographic shock remains the most serious concern for public debt sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides evidence on the sources of differences in inequality in educational scores and their evolution over time in four European countries. Using Programme for International Student Assessment data from the 2000 and the 2006 waves, the paper shows that inequality decreased in Germany and Spain (two "decentralised" schooling systems), whilst it increased in France and Italy (two "centralised" systems). The decomposition exercise shows that educational inequality not only does reflect the background related inequality, but also schools' characteristics especially. These characteristics are responsible for the observed evolution over time of inequality.

The Pandemic in Italy and Spain Italy and Spain share common institutional backgrounds (e.g. decentralized healthcare systems), but adopted a different model of governance during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic ([5]). Comparing the reactions to the pandemic in two countries (Italy and Spain) allows us to study whether hierarchical centralization in Spain fared better than informal decentralized coordination implemented in Italy. Nonetheless, the institutional design of the health system to address the needs of the COVID-19 pandemic was corrected in the second wave of the pandemic, when Spain followed Italy's lead and kept the pandemic governance decentralized. Results (not reported here for brevity) confirm a higher concentration of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy than in Spain, which implies that centralized governance allows for more homogeneous outcomes across regions, while a decentralized solution allows to identify best practices from those regions that have adopted unsuccessful choices. [Extracted from the article]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Italy, Eduscopio represents an interesting innovation to evaluate high schools' performance and to make information accessible to citizens. Despite a number of shortcomings, Eduscopio is a free internet portal that since 2014 offers information on the quality of high schools at the municipal level, measured on the performance of their graduates during the first year of university. This paper aims at studying the drivers in the use of this information by potential users. To this end, we collected information at municipal level on schools' quality, local news coverage of Eduscopio, and characteristics of the municipalities. Our results show that accessing the website is positively correlated with the average level of education and income of municipalities, thus somewhat supporting the worries that more information might lead to further discrimination. Secondly and however, the number of users is positively linked with both the variability in the quality of schools and the number of accessible schools in the area where the user resides. Thus, information is more sought when users can select between different schools and when quality varies significantly. In line with the theoretical literature, this might indeed induce forms of competition between producers that could lead to an overall improvement in the quality of services. A third important finding is a positive association between the number of users and the local news coverage of Eduscopio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We investigate the existence of an 'electoral cycle bias' in media reporting. • We consider the timing of media coverageof news about corruption scandals in Italy. • We analyze how the regional electoral cycles influence coverage of corruption news. • We find evidence of a 'partisan electoral cycle' for different newspapers. We investigate the existence of an 'electoral cycle bias' in the timing of media coverage of news with high political salience. In particular, we analyze how the electoral cycles at the regional level influence the coverage of news about corruption scandals in the Italian Regional Health Systems by two important national newspapers having opposite ideology, La Repubblica (left-wing oriented) and Il Giornale (right-wing oriented). Our findings show that Il Giornale significantly increases the number of articles about corruption scandals involving left-wing politicians since eight weeks before the elections, while it reduces the number of those about episodes of corruption without any political connection. On the contrary, La Repubblica increases the number of articles about episodes involving right-wing politicians only between four to eight weeks before the elections and it decreases those about no political episodes just the week right before them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does regional decentralization threaten the commitment to regional equality in government outcomes and outputs? We attempt to shed a light on this question by drawing on unique evidence from the largest European unitary states to have engaged in countrywide health system decentralization: Italy and Spain. We estimate, decompose and run a counterfactual analysis of regional inequality in government output (health expenditure per capita) and outcome (health system satisfaction) during the expansion of healthcare decentralization in both countries. We find no evidence of an increase in regional inequalities in outcomes and outputs in the examined period. Inequalities are accounted for by differences in health system design and management by regional governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze the Italian personal income tax (PIT) in the light of the different tools available to the government to achieve income redistribution. We focus in particular on three mechanisms: marginal tax rates, deductions, and tax credits. Exploiting an extended version of the standard Pfähler decomposition, we estimate the contribution of each of these three tools to the overall redistributive effect of the PIT using administrative data on more than 1.3 million individual tax returns. Our estimates suggest that more than half of the total PIT redistributive effect is due to the two most important tax credits (the tax credit for employment and the tax credit for retirement income), while the marginal rates schedule contribution is about 40 percent. On the contrary, most of the itemized expenditures do not show any sizable impact on redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We discuss the issue of how schools should be financed, concentrating on the role of private funding and public funding via subnational governments as accountability mechanisms in the provision of educational services. The historical evolution of school regulation in Italy and Spain has created differences in the percentage of pupils who attend private schools, the percentage of private school funding coming from public and private sources and the percentage of public school funding that comes from central or local government sources. We take advantage of these institutional diversities rooted in history to estimate the disciplining role of these different sources of funding in the context of an educational production function using Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data. Our results provide support to both accountability mechanisms and point to the presence of an important interplay between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We exploit variation across Italian regions in the implementation of region-specific tariffs within a prospective pay system for hospitals based on diagnosis-related groups to assess their effect on health and on the use of healthcare services. We consider survey data for the years 1993-2007 with information on both individuals' perceived health and their utilization of healthcare services. The results suggest that the introduction of market incentives via a fixed price payment system did not lead to worse health perceptions. Instead, it marked a moderate decrease in hospitalization coupled with a clearer decrease in the utilization of emergency services. We also find mild evidence of reduced satisfaction with healthcare services among hospital patients. These effects were stronger for adoptions occurring when also the national government supported the market-based approach. Results are robust to sensitivity checks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The presence of extensive housing subsidies characterizes the current Italian tax system as inefficient. In this article, we study whether inefficiency is the price to be paid to improve equity, by assessing the distributive impact of housing taxation on households’ well-being. We concentrate on the Personal Income Tax (PIT) on the main residence, and compare current provisions of the Tax Code with alternative approaches which consider the imputed rent (IR) from owner-occupied dwellings, and would make the tax system neutral with respect to the allocation of wealth among different assets. Holding revenues constant at the current level, we assess the distributional consequences of the IR approach in terms of several alternative scenarios. Our results suggest that the current tax system is as inefficient as it is inequitable. In particular, by including IR from owner-occupied dwellings as a component of the PIT gross income, we find that overall, inequality is reduced, while contemporaneously increasing efficiency in the allocation of wealth. Moreover, considering changes in tax liabilities for individual taxpayers, we show that taxing IRs will favour the young and penalize the elderly. (JEL Codes: H24, D31) [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We use a “natural experiment”, the fiscal adjustment of Italy in the 1990s to meet the Maastricht criteria, to test a simple model of soft budget constraint that closely resembles the intergovernmental relationships in the Italian public health care sector. We show that the link between the ex-ante financing by the Central government and the health expenditure by regions was stronger when regional expectations of future bailing outs were presumably lower. Confirming previous research, we also prove that more fiscally autonomous regions were more financially responsible and that a political “alignment” effect was present, with “friendly” regional governments controlling more expenditure than unfriendly ones. Our results suggest that, at least in Italy, bailing out expectations by regions may be the missing variable emphasised by [Culyer A.J., 1988. Health care expenditures in Canada: Myth and reality. Canadian Tax Papers, 82] for empirical models explaining health expenditure. Our results also raise some worries about the outcome of the current decentralization process in Europe. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper we deal with the role of proprietary structure in explaining efficiency within the Italian school industry. We analyze a sample of 497 schools located in Piemonte, a region in the North-Western part of the country, distinguishing between public, private for-profit and private nonprofit schools. In stage one of the analysis, we provide robust estimates of efficiency scores, using the two most widely known techniques in applied works, namely Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Stochastic Frontiers (SF). In stage two, we suggests that proprietary structure matters in explaining efficiency. Nonprofit schools are more efficient than public ones, whereas for-profit counterparts are outperformed by public producers. Moreover, we find that foreign and disabled students affects negatively efficiency, raising concerns for cream-skimming practices among private producers. Finally, school size is another important determinant of efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops an empirical analysis of the property rights theory by Henry Hansmann. Moreover, it analyses the rationale for the existence of co-operatives, and it describes their role in the Italian economy. After proposing a brief review of the theory, we investigate the dimension and the nature of co-operation in Italy, using 1991 Census data provided by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT). We address two complementary issues: what are the main activities of co-operatives and which are the provinces with the highest 'intensity of co-operation'. Finally, we derive a map of property rights in Italy, that allows us to test Hansmann's hypotheses. Our findings show that, in accordance with theoretical predictions, worker co-operatives emerge in cleaning services, vigilance services, and road transport of goods, where employees' tasks are standardized and homogeneous, firms need a relative small amount of capital, and real investments are not firm-specific. Seller and customer co-operatives mainly arise in food and drink manufacturing and food and drink wholesale distribution, where firms have potential market power. Moreover, investor-owned firms are common in mining and manufacturing, where high real investments are required, and where investments are firm-specific. Finally, non-profit organisations are concentrated in the sectors of education and welfare services, characterized by asymmetric information between customers and firms, and where collective consumption goods are produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decades, several European health systems have abandoned their vertically integrated health care in favour of some form of managed competition (MC), either in a centralised or decentralised format. However, during a pandemic, MC may put health systems under additional strain as they are designed to follow some form of 'organisational self-interest', and hence face reduced incentives for both provider coordination (e.g. temporary hospital close down, change in the case-mix), and information sharing. We illustrate our argument using evidence for the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak in Italy during March and April 2020, which calls for the development of 'coordination mechanisms' at times of a health emergency.

Since 2007, Italian regions running large deficits underwent recovery plans (Piani di Rientro) imposed by the central government. The goal was twofold: regions were asked (i) to restore a balanced budget and (ii) to continue supply the set of services defined by the constitution. We investigate whether recovery plans have reached their objectives. Our evidence suggests that recovery plans have proved to be an effective mechanism to eliminate subnational governments deficits. We also do not find any significant effects on health care utilization and on citizens' health. Overall, spending efficiency has likely improved., (© 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.)

This paper aims to assess the impact on citizens' well-being of fiscal discipline imposed by the central government on subnational governments. Because healthcare policies involve strategic interactions between different layers of governments in many different countries, we focus on a particular dimension of well-being, namely citizens' health. We model fiscal discipline by considering government expectations of future deficit bailouts from the central government. We then study how these bailout expectations affect the expenditure for healthcare policies carried out by decentralized governments. To investigate this issue, we separate efficient health spending from inefficiencies by estimating an input requirement frontier. This allows us to assess the effects of bailout expectations on both the structural component of health expenditure and its deviations from the 'best practice'. The evidence from the 15 Italian ordinary statute regions (observed from 1993 to 2006) points out that bailout expectations do not significantly influence the position of the frontier, thus not affecting citizens' health. However, they do appear to exert a remarkable impact on excess spending., (Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.)

In this paper we attempt to identify behavioral differences between public and private not-for-profit hospitals, by exploiting the introduction of the DRG-based payment system in the Italian NHS during the second half of the 1990s. We estimate the technical efficiency of a sample of hospitals for the period 1995-2000 considering an output distance function, and adopting both parametric (COLS and SF) and nonparametric (DEA) approaches. Our results show a convergence of mean efficiency scores between not-for-profit and public hospitals, and seem to suggest that differences in economic performances between competing ownership forms are more the result of the institutional settings in which they operate than the effect of the incentive structures embedded in the different proprietary forms. We also observe a decline in technical efficiency, probably due to policies aimed at reducing hospitalization rates., (Copyright (c) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.)