Italian Economic Journal最新文献

The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it analyzes Italian personal income distribution changes between 1991 and 2020 using the “relative distribution” method. This nonparametric tool uses all distribution information, unlike summary statistics. The analysis documents how distributional changes over time hollowed out the middle of the income distribution and increased household concentration around the highest and lowest deciles, causing polarization to rise. Second, and most importantly, the paper develops a novel approach to quantify the drivers of distributional changes by directly relating the impact of changes in the expected values of the covariates on the relative polarization indices, which code the direction and magnitude of distributional changes. Results show that the household head’s education and employment status increase the income distribution’s polarization over time. When the household’s head is female, foreign-born, or from the Centre/South/Islands, a counter-polarization effect occurs.

Over the past decade, the differences in economic development at the regional level have widened even further: Southern regions of Italy have consistently seen a decrease in their economic weight, highlighting a growing difficulty in employing the available workforce, a reduction in capital accumulation, and slower population growth compared to more advanced areas of the country. The private sector in the South, already significantly undersized, has further contracted; employment levels, already among the lowest in Europe, have further decreased, as has the average quality of employment. In light of this, the priorities of economic policy should be oriented towards two main objectives. The first concerns the improvement of the quality of public action. Secondly, a strengthening of private initiative appears necessary, through the reduction of infrastructure gaps in the South, the exploitation of the development potential of its urban agglomerations, and a qualitative improvement in the productive system.

We analyze the geographical differences in the Italian firms’ access conditions to credit in the period 2010–19. In line with earlier studies, our econometric results confirm that firms headquartered in the South of Italy face worse borrowing conditions compared to similar firms in the Centre-North. Southern firms pay higher interest rates on loans and are more frequently asked to pledge their assets as collateral. Credit lines granted to them are also more fragile as banks are more prone to call them back. Those less favorable credit access conditions end up reducing credit demand. Finally, we document, in line with previous studies, that the gap in credit conditions is partly due to external diseconomies that are more severe in the South of Italy.

The article explores the dynamic relationships between profits, product innovation and capital investments. A virtuous circle model is proposed where product innovation and investment are the key drivers of profits, which in turn support technological change and capital accumulation. In our model industries are characterised by two different trajectories for innovation and investments—either ‘embodied’ in machinery and equipment, aiming at cost competitiveness, or knowledge-related and aiming at technological competitiveness. The model is empirically tested on 40 manufacturing and service industries in six major European countries. The empirical analysis confirms that product innovations and capital investments are distinct drivers of profit growth. A virtuous circle between profit, innovation and investment is mainly found in the industries characterised by strategies of technological competitiveness.

The housing market is a key channel for monetary policy transmission. The literature has focused mainly on cyclical fluctuations in house prices rather than other indicators to account for housing market dynamics, such as residential transactions. This paper investigated the impact of the monetary policy stance on the housing market by considering residential transactions (together with house prices). First, we estimated a structural vector autoregressive (VAR) model for Italy from 1999Q1 to 2019Q4 using Cholesky structural identification. Second, we used an external instrument to identify the contemporaneous response of all endogenous variables to the shock of interest (Proxy-VAR). Our results indicate that transactions are more significantly reactive than house prices to a restrictive monetary policy shock. After a policy rate increases, the sudden stop in exchange volumes and the low degree of liquidity perceived in the housing market can contribute to shaping the housing wealth effect captured by prices. The results are supported by a robustness analysis based on local projections. Therefore, policy-makers should consider the role of residential transactions in evaluating the effectiveness of monetary policy transmission.

Financial education can influence the level of financial literacy. In many countries public authorities implement financial education policy by means of ex ante certification of both private and public providers of education activities. This article uses political economy, educational marketing and text analysis as complementary tools to offer a positive analysis of such setting. Being financial education a credence good and given the key assumption that financial literacy is a country state–contingent endowment that deteriorates, as a consequence of innovation, the third-party certification can be considered as a strategic governance solution. Yet, when a public agency acts as third-party certifier, political and bureaucratic incentives shape its action. In particular, political activism in financial education can be motivated by financial instability worries. Such theoretical relationship is empirically confirmed applying text analyses, and using financial education narrative as a proxy for activism both for the politicians of the European Parliament and the bureaucrats of the ECB in the period 1997–2024.

This study documents that competent access to financial markets can smooth consumption in the face of idiosyncratic income shocks. Using household-level data on financial literacy and financial resilience in Italy during the first phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, we find that financial literacy and financial asset ownership both influenced consumption changes in theoretically sensible ways. The results are robust in specifications controlling for several socio-demographic characteristics, saving choices, public transfers, and to different estimation methods.

The intricate relationship between Internet access, freedom, and the spread of COVID-19 during the pandemic remains a crucial topic, important both for understanding what happened and for improving the response to future crises. This study investigates the impact of the share of Internet users, and its relationship with Internet freedom, on the COVID-19 transmission rate, addressing research questions regarding the interplay between these factors. Analyzing a panel dataset of 60 countries during the first wave, hybrid F-GLS models reveal that an increased number of Internet users correlates with a larger number of new daily COVID-19 cases. Conversely, the interaction between Internet users and net freedom attenuates the positive relationship between users and case counts, implying that the latter has a moderating role. These findings emphasize the multifaceted nature of the Internet’s influence on pandemic dynamics, and highlight how it acts both as a facilitator and a constraint.

This paper explores households’ decision-making process to undertake green retrofitting investments, with the aim to identify the key behavioural drivers to adoption. We developed a discrete choice experiment survey and collected data from a sample of 434 individuals to explore the influence of monetary and non-monetary incentives on energy saving investment choices, focusing on the case of Italy, where a tax relief scheme (the so-called Superbonus) was introduced in 2020 to encourage green retrofitting investments. Our results show that the level of savings on energy bills, the environmental sustainability of the intervention and the comfort achieved all similarly contribute to adopt energy saving measures. Tax incentives, differently, were found to be less important drivers, except for those respondents who have a high level of green retrofitting cognition, suggesting a pivotal role of education and knowledge in driving choices. Our findings also indicate that communication matters: we show that green retrofitting decisions are influenced by the non-technical communication of the environmental benefits, while the use of technical expressions is found to be ineffective. These results are relevant to guide more efficient policy design and point to the need to combine targeted tax interventions with communication to encourage the uptake of energy saving measures.

This paper delves into the evaluation of environmental policy, focusing on the role of green consumption, previously neglected in the literature. This article analyzes how green consumption, driven by environmental awareness, affects business cycles and the transmission mechanism of environmental policies. We augment the standard Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model to evaluate these transmission mechanisms by including endogenous green consumption choices, time-varying environmental concerns, and an environmental concern shock. The model is estimated using Bayesian estimation for the US economy, measuring public environmental concerns based on a Climate Change News Index. Our findings indicate that (i) an environmental concern shock plays a crucial role in influencing the variances of both renewable and fossil energy consumption, thereby contributing to the decoupling of emissions and GDP; (ii) environmental concerns lead to reduced investments in emissions abatement by dirty firms under a cap-and-trade policy; (iii) green consumption driven by environmental awareness dampen macroeconomic fluctuations amplifying the negative impact on consumption after adverse exogenous shocks; (iv) over the transition to climate neutrality, sustainable goods mitigate adverse impacts on consumption.