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We investigate the impact of fetal exposure to air pollution on health outcomes at birth in Italy in the 2000s combining information on mother’s residential location from birth certificates with information on PM10 concentrations from air quality monitors. The potential endogeneity deriving from differential pollution exposure is addressed by exploiting as-good-as-random variation in rainfall shocks as an instrumental variable for air pollution concentrations. Our results show that both average levels of PM10 and days above the hazard limit have detrimental effects on birth weight, duration of gestation as well as overall health status at birth. These effects are mainly driven by pollution exposure during the third trimester of pregnancy and further differ in size with respect to the maternal socio-economic status, suggesting that babies born to socially disadvantaged mothers are more vulnerable. Given the non negligible effects of pollution on birth outcomes, further policy efforts are needed to fully protect fetuses from the adverse effects of air pollution and to mitigate the environmental inequality of health at birth.

An instrumental variables (IV) identification strategy that exploits statutory class size caps shows significant achievement gains in smaller classes in Italian primary schools. Gains from small classes are driven mainly by schools in Southern Italy, suggesting a substantial return to class size reductions for residents of the Mezzogiorno. In addition to high unemployment and other social problems, however, the Mezzogiorno is distinguished by pervasive manipulation of standardized test scores, a finding revealed in a natural experiment that randomly assigns school monitors. IV estimates also show that small classes increase score manipulation. Dishonest scoring appears to be a consequence of teacher shirking in answer sheet transcription, rather than cheating by either students or teachers. Estimates of a causal model for achievement with two endogenous variables, class size and score manipulation, suggest that the effects of class size on measured achievement are driven entirely by the relationship between class size and manipulation. These findings show how consequential score manipulation can arise even in assessment systems with few NCLB-style accountability concerns.

We derive bounds for the average of math and language scores of elementary school students in Italy correcting for pervasive score manipulation. Information on the fraction of manipulated data is retrieved from a natural experiment that randomly assigns external monitors to schools. We show how bounds can be tightened imposing restrictions on the measurement properties of the manipulation indicator developed by the government agency charged with test administration and data collection. We additionally assume that manipulation is more likely in those classes at the lower end of the distribution of true scores. Our results show that regional rankings by academic performance are reversed once manipulation is properly taken into account.

This paper investigates the impact of the public smoking ban which came into effect in Italy on January 2005 on individual smoking behaviour. Current empirical evidence supports the existence of a negative effect of the Italian ban on smoking prevalence and consumption in the general population. This is in contrast to what has been found in some other European countries. Our analysis shows that the apparent success of the Italian smoking ban is due to the fact that existing results do not take into account seasonal differences in smoking behaviour. Using quarterly data from the 1999/2000 and 2004/2005 Italian Health Surveys and adopting a difference-in-difference approach that nets out monthly variation in smoking rates, we show that the Italian smoking ban had no impact on individual smoking behaviour for the population as a whole, and only small effects on some groups of individuals.

This paper studies the impact of the introduction of joint custody in Italy (Law 54/2006) on judiciary outcomes. As to the formal (legal) assignment of joint custody, the reform envisaged very little judge discretion. With reference to the substance of the custody (the amount of time each parent spends with the child and the money involved in post-dissolution arrangements), the law established new principles while leaving plenty of implementation power to the judges. Our results - based on court data that covers the universe of separations from 2000 to 2010 - document that the law was only cosmetically applied by the judges. Compared to the pre-reform regime, the share of sole legal custody assignments to the mother drastically decreased. However, court implementation washed out the new principles: the provisions of the law related to the financial post-separation arrangements remained unapplied. This suggests that the main innovative aspect of the law - the possibility for a child to spend an adequate amount of time with both parents - was also left unchanged with respect to the previous regime of sole maternal custody. As joint effect of the introduction of the law and the little degree to which the new principles have been translated into actual verdicts, there was a surge in litigiousness among separating spouses and judicial inefficiency. Moreover, the incentives for a female partner to apply for a separation raised. The paper discusses a possible rationale for the findings and some related policy remedies. As for the former, the evidence we present can be explained by the adoption of gender-biased judiciary practices. As for the latter, our results suggest that a restatement of the law, to define a narrowed grid of prescriptions that constrain judge discretion, could be an effective corrective action.

Efficiency wages theories argue that the threat of firing, coupled with a high unemployment rate, is a mechanism that discourages employee shirking in asymmetric information contexts. Our empirical analysis aims to verify the role of unemployment as a worker discipline device, considering the different degree of job security offered by the Italian Employment Protection Legislation to workers employed in small and large firms. We use a panel of administrative data (WHIP) and consider sickness absences as an empirical proxy for employee shirking. Controlling for a number of individual and firm characteristics, we investigate the relationship between worker's absences and local unemployment rate (at the provincial level). We find a strong negative impact of unemployment on absenteeism rate, which is considerable larger in small firms due to a significantly lower protection from dismissals in these firms. We also find that workers who are absent more frequently face higher risks of dismissal. As an indirect test of the role of unemployment as worker's discipline device we show that public sector employees, almost impossible to fire, do not react to the local unemployment.

This paper investigates labor supply and redistributive effects of in-work benefits for Italian married couples using a tax-benefit microsimulation model and a multi-sectoral discrete choice model of labor supply. We consider two in-work benefit schemes following the key principles of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Working Tax Credit (WTC) existing in the US and the UK, respectively. The standard design of these in-work benefits is however augmented with a new benefit premium for two-earner households in order to overcome the well-known disincentive effects that these welfare instruments may generate on secondary earners. In simulation, the proposed in-work benefits are financed through the abolition of Italian family allowances for dependent employees and contingent workers thus ensuring tax revenue neutrality. We show that our EITC and WTC reforms have strong positive effects on labor supply of wives, weak negative effects on labor supply of husbands, and strong positive effects on equity. The EITC is more effective than the WTC in boosting employment of wives, while the WTC is more effective than the EITC in fighting poverty. In both schemes, the trade-off between labor supply incentives and redistributive effects is crucially related to the new benefit premium for two-earner households. Other things being equal, tax revenue neutrality implies that a higher value of this policy coefficient yields stronger incentive effects and weaker redistributive effects.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) on fertility decisions of Italian working women using administrative data. We exploit a reform that introduced in 1990 costs for dismissals unmotivated by a 'fair cause' or 'justified motive' in firms below 15 employees and left firing costs unchanged for bigger firms. We use this quasi-experimental setup to study the hypothesis that increased EPL reduces future job insecurity and positively affects a female worker's proneness to take childbearing decisions. We use a difference in difference (OLS-DID) model to control for possible period-invariant sorting bias and an instrumental variable (IV-DID) model to account for time-varying endogeneity of the treatment status. We find that reduced economic insecurity following a strengthening of the EPL regime has a positive and sizable effect on fertility decisions of Italian working women. This result is robust to a number of checks regarding possible interactions with other policy reforms occurring around 1990, changes in the sample of workers and firms, and use of an alternative set of exclusion restrictions.

This paper investigates the way in which job mobility contributes to the emergence of a gender wage gap in the Italian labour market. We show that men experience higher wage growth than women during the first 10 years of their career, and that this difference is particularly large when workers move across firms. This gender mobility penalty is robust to the inclusion of individual, job and firm characteristics, to different ways of accounting for individual unobserved heterogeneity, and is mainly found for voluntary job moves. Exploring the wage growth of job movers, we find that a significant gender wage penalty emerges when workers move to larger firms. This might be explained by the fact that bigger establishments offer jobs more highly valued by women than men or that the relationship between job satisfaction and firm size is less negative for women than men. Using data on job satisfaction, we find evidence for the latter hypothesis as well as some indication that wages and fringe benefits compensate for lower levels of job satisfaction in larger firms, but that this is so only for men.

This paper explores newly available Italian data derived from a 1:90 sample of social security administrative records (INPS) to investigate gender differences in pay during the initial stages of a worker's career. We find that a significant and growing pay differential between men and women emerges during the first years of labour market experience, and that gender differences are highest when workers move across firms. In particular, we find that the most significant gender gap in log wage growth is associated with job moves which take place within a very short period of time, involve positive wage growth and result in the highest salary increases. Moreover, this gender mobility penalty occurs mainly when workers move to larger firms and we show that this is most likely explained by the fact that women value more than men some of the characteristics of these jobs or employers. Overall our results suggest that job and firm characteristics, rather than differences in worker characteristics or across-the-board discrimination, are the most important determinants of the gender wage growth differential in the Italian labour market.

We analyze data from the 1994-2002 waves of the British Household Panel Survey to explore the influence of parental smoking habits on their children's smoking decisions. In order to account for the potential endogeneity of parental smoking habits we use instrumental variable methods. We find that mothers play a crucial role in determining their daughters' smoking decisions, while fathers' smoking habits are transmitted primarily to their sons

In Italy the participation of women has not increased very much in the last few decades relative to other developed countries and it is still among the lowest in Europe. The female employment rate stands almost 13 percentage points below the EU average and 22 below the Lisbon target. One of the most important reasons is related to the characteristics of child care system. In this paper we analyze the characteristics of the child care system in Italy and its relationship to the labor market participation decision of mothers. We present a simple discrete choice framework in which the two decisions can be jointly considered, which also allows for simple forms of rationing and estimate a bivariate probit model of the child care and employment decisions and interpret the results within the framework of our model. We find evidence that rationing is an important factor in interpreting price effects on utilization rates.

In spite of relatively generous public subsidies and a reputation for high quality, only a very limited proportion of Italian families use public child care. In this paper we explore the significance of various factors on the choices made between different types of child care. In part one, we use a simulation exercise to show the impact of cost and availability on child care choices. In part two, we present the results of an explorative econometric analysis using a matched data set for 1998 from the Bank of Italy (SHIW) and ISTAT Multiscopo. We find evidence that factors related to family composition and support as well as to the characteristics of child care are important in explaining the choices made by Italian families. Assistance provided by grandmothers and husbands appears to be of crucial significance to Italian mothers who are seeking to reconcile the difficulties stemming from the rigidity of the labor market and the limitations of child care. Rationing, both of public and private child care, also proves to be an important factor affecting households? choices. An understanding of the importance of these factors is relevant in the evaluation of social policies encouraging mothers? participation in the labor market in Italy.

The paper aims to ascertain whether voluntary money transfers may be explained by the existence of self-enforcing family constitutions. We identify a circumstance in which an agent will behave differently if she is optimizing subject to a family constitution, than if she is moved by either altruistic or exchange motivations. The circumstance is the presence of a binding credit ration, which may raise the probability of making a money transfer (and the amount of money transferred) if a family constitution exists, but will have the opposite effect if the transfer is either a gift, or payments for services rendered. Allowing for possible endogeneity, we find that rationing has a positive effect on the probability of giving money, and on the amount given, if the potential giver is under the age of retirement and has children, but no significant effect if the person has no children, or is over the retirement age. This rejects the hypothesis that money transfers are motivated by either altruistic or straight exchange motives, but not the one that these transfers are governed by family constitutions.

In this paper we analyse data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 to investigate whether experiencing parental divorce during adolescence reduces measured cognitive ability. To account for the potential endogeneity of parental divorce we employ a difference-in-differences model that relies on observing teenagers' outcomes before and after divorce. We find that parental divorce does not negatively affect teenagers' cognitive development. Our results also suggest that cross-section estimates overstate the detrimental effect of parental divorce.

In this paper we analyse data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 to investigate whether experiencing parental divorce during adolescence reduces measured cognitive ability. To account for the potential endogeneity of parental divorce we employ a difference-in-differences model that relies on observing teenagers' outcomes before and after divorce. We find that parental divorce does not negatively affect teenagers' cognitive development. Our results also suggest that cross-section estimates overstate the detrimental effect of parental divorce.

Defence date: 12 May 2003 Examining board: Prof. Andrea Ichino, EUI, Supervisor ; Prof. Frank Vella, EUI ; Prof. Daniela Del Boca, Università di Torino ; Prof. John Ermisch, ISER, Essex PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digitised archive of EUI PhD theses completed between 2013 and 2017

http://www.iue.it/PUB/ECO2003-4.pdf