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International audience; We examine whether and to what extent political institutions explain different performances in income redistribution across countries. After reviewing the available data sources, the measures of income redistribution and the traditional demand side explanations of redistribution, we focus our analysis on supply side factors, like political and economic institutions, rent seeking processes and the resources and instruments available for redistribution. We provide robust empirical evidence on the association between these different factors and the observed degree of redistribution. Our analysis supports the view that-for a given demand of redistribution-political and economic institutions contribute to explain differences across countries in the observed degree of redistribution.

In this paper, we study whether precautionary saving motives have an intergenerational component; namely whether and to what extent the income uncertainty of younger generations affects the savings of their parents. To this end, we exploit a cross-country European longitudinal household dataset collecting information on parents and their and offspring, augmented with indicators for their offspring’s income risk. We find that savings significantly respond to changes in income risk, also across generations. This finding is robust to several checks and displays heterogeneity across countries, which is consistent with substitutability between private and public insurance tools.

In this paper, we provide new evidence on whether individuals differ in their level of trust depending on their exposure to unexpected terrorist attacks during crucial life phases. In line with the well-grounded psychological theories on the formation of human beliefs, attitudes, and values, we find that exposure to traumatic and violent events in the two essential stages of human development – adolescence and early adulthood – reduces trust in other people. The formed values tend to be persistent over time, and the results are robust to several checks.

International audience; Using data from three waves of PIRLS, this paper examines the effect of teacher quality on fourth-grade students' literacy test scores by exploiting variations induced by reforms in teachers' selection and/or reward schemes. We construct an original data set of relevant reforms taking place at the national level over the last century and affecting the working conditions of primary school teachers, matching them by the year they entered the profession. After showing that teacher experience/age and qualification are significantly correlated with student competencies, we study the correlation between teacher working conditions (including recruitment, pay and retirement policies) and pupil achievement. Our identifying assumption is that the impact of reforms dissipates with the distance between the reform's introduction and entry into the profession. The results point to a more selective recruitment process and, to a lesser extent, more generous reward policies as effective ways to enhance student performance.

This paper investigates whether the gender of elected politicians affects political outcomes at the municipal level. Relying on Italian administrative data from 1991 to 2009, we are able to instrument the gender of elected politicians using an institutional exogenous change: a gender quota in the candidacy list enforced only in a subsample of municipalities and for a short period of time. While the gender of politicians does not affect the general ‘quality of life’, proxied by the internal migration rate, it does increase significantly both the efficacy of policies targeting women and households, proxied by the fertility rate, and the efficiency of the municipal administration, proxied by the actual size of the administrative bodies. These results, which are robust to several specifications and checks, suggest that affirmative action enhancing gender equality in political representation may be beneficial not only in terms of social justice but also from a political outcome perspective.

Political coordination and policy outcomes may be the result not only of the position of the ‘median voter’ in a political scale but also of the heterogeneity of preferences around the median. Depending on the level of government and the type of policy, such heterogeneity may lead to lower public spending and redistribution. We assess this issue empirically by analyzing the relationship between the distribution of preferences for redistribution and the amount of public expenditure at different levels of government and for several types of spending in 23 European countries. Our results suggest a negative and significant correlation between heterogeneity of preferences for redistribution and public spending that is stronger at the local level and for redistributive functions, independent of the median individual's preferences.

This paper examines the interaction between altruism towards offspring and precautionary savings. It investigates whether increased uncertainty in children labor income fosters savings of parents. We first construct a two-periods and two-generations model, to underline which are the mechanisms behind the intergenerational precautionary motive for savings. Second, we exploit two micro datasets to test the main theoretical implications. Parents’ consumption turns out to respond to the offspring’s income risk. This result is robust to the presence of family fixed effects and to many alternative empirical specifications.

This paper examines the impact of social heterogeneity on in-kind redistribution. We contribute to the previous literature in two ways: we consider (i) the provision of several public goods and (ii) agents different not only in income, but also in their preferences over the various goods provided by the public sector. In this setting, both the distribution and size of goods provision depend on the heterogeneity of preferences. Our main result is that preference heterogeneity tends to decrease in-kind redistribution, while income inequality tends to increase it. An empirical investigation based on United States Census Bureau data confirms these theoretical findings.

This study proposes a new empirical strategy for assessing how "efficient" different individuals and groups are in converting their available resources into achievements. Following the capabilities approach, pioneered by Amartya Sen, we employ the concept of "conversion rates" to capture the efficiency of the link from resources to achievements. The methodology is both simpler and more conceptually precise than previous options, this offering the potential to support significant expanded work in this area. The proposed methodology is then tested in relation to health care in Italy. The findings suggest that investments in education may carry particular health benefits for women, which public resources are particularly important for the elderly, and that single individuals pose special challenges because they benefit less from all types of resources than married couples. The results thus highlight significant heterogeneities in the abilities of different groups to convert public, private, and nonfinancial resources into health, and we conclude by noting the possible consequences for health care and public policies.

This paper improves the empirical investigation on the effectiveness of the median voter theorem. Using high quality data, it is possible to directly observe individual net cash transfers in several countries and to investigate the effects of taxes and transfers on different social classes and in aggregate. This allows testing of both the “redistribution hypothesis” (more inequality leads to more redistribution in aggregate) and the “median voter hypothesis” (the middle class plays a special role in policy making). Results suggest acceptance of the former and reject on, or at least questioning, of the latter. Not only the gains from redistribution are negligible for the middle class, but also the link between income and redistribution is also lower for it than for any other class of income. Moreover, the strength of the median voter seems to fall over time. Finally, the amount of redistribution targeted to the middle class is lower in more asymmetric societies, a result that contrasts strongly with the median voter theorem.

in this paper we exploit pension reform-induced changes in retirement eligibility requirements to assess the role of grandparental child care availability in the employment of women who have children under 15. We focus on Italy for two reasons: first, it has low rates of female employment and little formal child care provision and, second, it has undergone several pension reforms in a relatively short time span. Our analysis shows that, among the women studied, those whose own mothers are retirement eligible have a 13 percent higher probability of being employed than those whose mothers are ineligible. The pension eligibility of maternal grandfathers and paternal grandparents, however, has no significant effect on the women's employment probability. We also demonstrate that the eligibility of maternal grandmothers mainly captures the effect of their availability for child care. Hence, pension reforms, by potentially robbing households of an important source of flexible, low-cost child care, could have unintended negative consequences for the employment rates of women with children.

As an answer to soaring oil prices, stabilization mechanisms based on specific taxes, such as the French ‘TIPP flottante’, have been discussed and introduced in some countries in early 2000s, but then soon abandoned. Our contribution aims at analyzing the excise pass-through and the cost shifting in a comprehensive European context to understand whether such a mechanism could actually reach its target. Our results show that, on average, fuel tax reductions are effective in stabilize consumer price, but the measure is particularly costly for public budgets.

This paper examines the impact of social heterogeneity on in-kind redistribution. We contribute to the previous literature in two ways: we consider i) the provision of several public goods and ii) agents different not only in income, but also in their preferences over the various goods provided by the public sector. In this setting, both the distribution and size of goods provision depend on the heterogeneity of preferences. Our main result is that preference heterogeneity tends to decrease in-kind redistribution, while income inequality tends to increase it. An empirical investigation based on United States Census Bureau data confirms these theoretical findings.

This article analyses the relationship between schooling expansion and educational inequality in a panel of developed countries over different birth cohorts. We extend previous literature by exploiting the longitudinal dimension of our data and by focussing on different measures of inequality. Using either a Gini or a Theil measure of inequality, we find evidence that at higher average levels of education further increases are associated with rising inequality. The inverted-U Kuznets curve appears to depend on using the standard deviation as the measure of inequality. We also discuss how educational policies may influence educational inequality and find that the length of compulsory education affects inequality only through its effect on average education, whilst school tracking shapes inequality independently of the level of education. © Oxford University Press 2013. All rights reserved

This paper describes a new dataset, in which measures of educational level and inequality were collected for 48 countries over 13 5-year birth cohorts. Drawing on four representative international surveys (ess, eu-silc, ials and issp), we collected measures of individual educational attainment and aggregated them to generate synthetic indices of educational level and dispersion by countries and birth cohorts. The paper provides a detailed description of the procedures and methodologies adopted to build the new dataset, analyses the validity and consistency of the measures across surveys and discusses the relevance of these data for future research. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

This book addresses key questions about whether inequality in incomes, wealth, and education have been widening in a consistent fashion across 30 rich nations. It considers possible drivers of these developments, and it scrutinises scrutinizes whether this widening is exacerbating social problems and undermining the healthy functioning of democratic processes. It sets out to answer these questions by looking in depth at the experience of 30 countries over the past 30 years, examining what has actually been happening to these inequalities and investigating how this can be related to social and political outcomes such as poverty, family structures, health and health inequalities, crime, political participation, and attitudes and values. This brings out that although many countries have seen some increase in income inequality, country experiences have varied widely, that an immediate impact on average levels of social problems is difficult to see though there may be some interaction with political behaviours and changes to social gradients. What does stand out is that policies matter both in terms of ameliorating background inequality pressures and mitigating the extent to which inequalities in income spill over to other domains.

There are two main dimensions of inequality in Italy. On one side, there is geography. The sharp division between a more developed North and a backwards South has been a central feature of the country since the birth of the Italian national state, and is still, a central topic of Italian politics and public discussion. The weakness of the state is the second major reason to explain the relatively high level of inequality observed in contemporary Italy. On one side, the inefficiency of the state directly condemns to failure any redistributive policy aimed at effectively reducing income inequality and other kinds of inequality. On the other side, the weakness of the state indirectly increases social inequality, as it is complemented by individualistic, market-based mobilization and by the strength of particular social groups. Among the latter, the most important is surely the family, but also trade unions, employers’ association and the professions have played a strong role in Italian politics.

The paper focuses on the expansion of participation to education and on its drivers separately for each level (lower secondary, upper secondary, tertiary). In doing this, we build a bridge between economic research, who typically focuses on years of education, and sociological research, who typically considers the title of study achieved by individuals. Building on a new and careful recoding and harmonization of educational levels, we use ESS data for 26 European countries to analyze the process of expansion of participation to three levels of schooling in Europe, from the cohort born in the 20s to the one born in the first half of the 80s. We look at the drivers of this process, studying which factors push the expansion of participation to each school level. Our analytical strategy includes three steps, for each level of schooling. First, we test sociological theories stressing path-dependency as the main driver of educational expansion (whichever the mechanism pushing it), regressing the latter on previous achievement and on measures of direct demand. Second, we add different sets of covariates, each one testing a group of theoretical hypothesis on the factors driving expansion. We consider: a) economic factors; b) political factors; c) social (contagion) factors. Third, we look at convergence over time. Results of our fixed-effects models show both path-dependency and convergence, but there is a strong difference among levels: while participation to lower and upper secondary school shows convergence, no convergence is found for participation to tertiary education.

This paper analyses the relationship between schooling expansion and educational inequality in a panel of developed countries over different birth cohorts. Compared to previous literature, we expand the comprehension of this relationship by exploiting the longitudinal dimension of our data and by focusing on different measures of inequality. We find evidence of a non-linear relationship between expansion and inequality of education and we argue that this evidence is complementary and not necessarily in contrast with the educational Kuznets curve found by previous studies. We also discuss how educational policies may influence educational inequality and we find that the length of compulsory education affects inequality only through its effect on average education, while school tracking shapes inequality independently of the level of education. JEL codes: I21, I24

By way of introduction This report provides the fi rm foundation for anchoring the research that will be performed by the GINI project. It subsequently considers the fi elds covered by each of the main work packages: ● inequalities of income, wealth and education, ● social impacts, ● political and cultural impacts, and ● policy effects on and of inequality. Though extensive this review does not pretend to be exhaustive. The review may be “light” in some respects and can be expanded when the analysis evolves. In each of the four fi elds a signifi cant number of discussion papers will be produced, in total well over 100. These will add to the state of the art while also covering new round and generating results that will be incorporated in the Analysis Reports to be prepared for the work packages. In that sense, the current review provides the starting point. At the same time, the existing body of knowledge is broader or deeper depending on the particular fi eld and its tradition of research. The very motivation of GINI’s focused study of the impacts of inequalities is that a systematic study is lacking and relatively little is known about those impacts. This also holds for the complex collection of, the effects that inequality can have on policy making and the contributions that policies can make to mitigating inequalities but also to enhancing them. By contrast, analyses of inequality itself are many, not least because there is a wide array of inequalities; inequalities have become more easily studied comparatively and much of that analysis has a signifi cant descriptive fl avour that includes an extensive discussion of measurement issues. @GINI hopes to go beyond that and cover the impacts of inequalities at the same time

This paper describes a new dataset collecting measures of educational level and inequality for 31 countries over several birth cohorts. Drawing on four representative international datasets (ESS, EIJSILC, IALS and ISSP), we collect measures of individual educational attainment and aggregate them to generate synthetic indices of education level and dispersion by countries and birth cohorts. The paper provides a detailed description of the procedures and methodologies adopted to build the new dataset, analyses the validity and consistency of the measures across surveys and discusses the relevance of these data for future research. The .csv, .dta, .xml dataset is readily available to GINI members (see website data portal); other scholars may put in a request to the authors YEL Classification: I21, D30, Y1

The amount of taxes and public expenditures seems to be uncorrelated to the level of market inequality in OECD countries. This empirical evidence is diffcult to be rationalized in a standard median voter theorem setting, where individuals rationally choose their preferred redistribution scheme. This paper reconciles theory and evidence by introducing a source of political asymmetry, that is income inequality: assuming that political activity is costly, income distribution can be a determinant of political asymmetry, provided that some classes of individuals are not able to satisfy their political budget constraint. The political framework consists of a bi-dimensional policy space where preferences over cash redistribution are monotonically decreasing with income, while those over in-kind redistribution depend on the middle class position, according to Director's law. The result is that the elected policy maker is increasingly biased toward rich classes of population as far as market income inequality increases.