Italian Economic Journal最新文献

This paper proposes a strategy for nowcasting tourist overnight stays in Italy by exploiting payment card data and Google Search indices. The strategy is applied to national and regional overnight stays at a time of a significant and unanticipated shock to tourism flows and payment habits (the COVID-19 pandemic). Our results show that indicators based on payment data are very informative for predicting tourist volumes, both at the national and at the regional level. Instead, the predictive power of Google Search data is more limited.

The Italian guaranteed minimum income programme is the topic of a heated debate scarcely supported by empirical evidence. We investigate the effects of the programme on the number of days worked by different types of vulnerable jobseekers who receive the related income transfer in 2019 and are subject to activation attempts by employment services. We use data from Tuscany, in many ways a typical Italian region. To draw causal claims, we adopt a difference-in-differences approach with multiple time periods and staggered treatment adoptions. Our findings suggest that the programme has very limited heterogeneous effects among different types of users but also that, all in all, it is rather employment-neutral, in the sense that it neither creates significant disincentives to work nor succeeds in creating sufficient employment opportunities to solve the problem of job insecurity. An anti-poverty strategy that does not feed further welfare dependency would require a qualitative leap forward in activation efforts by employment services.

We provide new evidence on the effectiveness of hiring subsidies that target the long-term unemployed, by analysing a place-based policy, which encouraged permanent employment in the Italian South, an area characterised by a low participation rate and high levels of informal employment. To achieve identification, we use a triple difference estimator, which exploits three sources of variation: (i) the subsidy was only for the long-term unemployed and not for the short-term ones; (ii) although it was also available in Centre-North, it was significantly more generous in the South; (iii) it was in place until 2014. We find evidence that the policy facilitated access to permanent employment: after the program ended, the relative probability of finding a permanent job dropped for eligible individuals in southern regions. This effect does not seem to be driven by substitutions over time, across contracts or among jobseekers. An analysis of fiscal sustainability shows that the policy was globally in surplus. In terms of long-term effects, subsidised contracts used to last longer than non-subsidised ones.

This paper examines the wage penalty of outsourced workers in France, providing novel insights to the existing literature. First, it investigates the extent to which the wage penalty differs between outsourced male and female workers. Our results reveal that outsourced workers experience pronounced wage penalty, with this effect being stronger for women. Second, in contrast to most studies, we analyse outsourcing across the entire job distribution. We find that the wage penalty is significantly higher for outsourced workers employed in jobs at the lower end of the wage distribution compared to those employed at the top. Third, we assess whether the wage penalty experienced by outsourced workers can be attributed to the tasks they perform, such as repetitiveness, forms of control, and managerial duties. The results show that the tasks performed, while can alter the wage penalty, do not significantly reshape the main results. Thus, differences in tasks do not appear to be a determining factor in the wage penalty of outsourced workers. Longitudinal analysis strengthens the validity of the cross-sectional findings, highlighting that the wage penalty associated with outsourcing does not result from shifts in individual employee characteristics but rather from disparities in their job status and other time-invariant attributes. In summary, being an outsourced worker implies a degradation in wage treatment, which is exacerbated by gender. Given the increasing importance of this employment practice, it underscores the urgent need for policy interventions to address these critical issues.

We explore the effects of income poverty on the probability of being in arrears in Italy. We account for endogeneity by using a bivariate discrete response model, which allows considering feedback effects from arrears to future poverty status and selection issues. We also offer an analysis by macro-region. We use longitudinal 2016–2019 EU-SILC data. Our results suggest that being in arrears is characterized by a significant trap effect, which, however, tends to decline over time. We also find the presence of feedback effects from arrears condition to future poverty status. Notably, current poverty status is negatively associated with current arrears status, but the correlation is positive in the medium term. This may suggest that income conditions need time to exert their effects on the probability of being in arrears. In the medium term, being in arrears increases the probability of being poor. We also note heterogeneity at the regional level.

The longstanding debate on the effectiveness of foreign aid has largely concluded that corruption is one of the major reasons for the failure of aid to sustain development in recipient countries. This paper investigates whether greater involvement of women in recipient countries' political and economic life enhances the effectiveness of foreign aid by reducing the corruption that usually accompanies massive foreign aid. The hypothesis is tested by cross-country empirical analysis, addressing the potential endogeneity of aid and women’s participation using an IV approach. We provide robust and causal evidence that greater women’s political and labor market participation does reduce the corruption associated with foreign aid, especially when the aid targets sectors that enhance women’s well-being. Moreover, we find that while all the dimensions of women's social participation are effective in reducing corruption, the greatest effect derives from the political dimension.

Hiring subsidies are among the most widely used policies to support employment growth for certain groups of workers or disadvantaged geographic areas. In this article, we analyze the medium-run consequences of a generous, non-targeted permanent hiring subsidy implemented throughout Italy in 2015, which was widely used by firms. The results indicate that firms benefiting from the subsidy increased in size. However, compared to other firms, the growth rate of capital–labour ratio and value added per worker were lower after the subsidy. We conclude that policies to stimulate hiring must be accompanied by other interventions to support capital accumulation.

We review the implications of an intertemporal representative consumer model for the analysis of housing prices, describing the choice between non-housing and housing consumption, and provide an explanation for the excess return of housing over the riskless rate based on weakly separable preferences. Further considerations are presented regarding the role of liquidity constraints. A Bayesian structural vector autoregression predicts relations between real rent growth, interest rates and housing prices consistently with the representative consumer model. The orthogonalized impulse response functions show, that housing prices are relatively unresponsive to shocks to fundamental value. The logarithmic rent/price ratio increases or does not significantly change following shocks to the real rent growth and relative bill rates. The dynamics of housing prices over the business cycle is mainly determined by financial factors. A shock to the natural logarithm of the rent/price ratio does not have significant predictive properties for subsequent real rent growth and relative bill rates. Moreover, the logarithmic rent/price ratio is a highly persistent variable displaying momentum and long term reversal.

We present novel data from a survey on the perception of dishonesty in Italy. We collected data at a mass-gathering music festival in Southern Italy, whose audience includes a relevant fraction of subjects residing in Northern Italy. The survey consists of questions on perceived dishonesty measured on an institutional, social, and everyday dimension. Using structural equation models, we estimate whether regional differences in the perception of dishonesty persist even when controlling for generalized trust and socio-demographic characteristics. From a sample of nearly 1000 individuals, we find that respondents residing in the North or abroad perceive a lower level of dishonesty in its institutional and everyday dimension than Southern respondents. Perceived dishonesty also correlates negatively with trust. Finally, we find suggestive evidence of an indirect channel going from the area of residence to perceived dishonesty through generalized trust as a mediator.

In Italy, the share of temporary employment varies significantly across regions, with higher averages observed in the South. This paper examines the extent to which the North–South gap relates to different firms’ hiring strategies, or rather that it stems from the evolution and the duration of job contracts. Using a unique source of contract-level administrative data, we analyse entry conditions in the labour market and the evolution of temporary positions. Our results suggest that the greater use of fixed-term contracts in the South is not attributable to differences in firms’ hiring strategies. In fact, workers are initially hired on a temporary basis more frequently in the North. The geographical gap, instead, stems from the lower probability that these temporary positions are eventually converted into an open-ended contract. Furthermore, we observe regional variations in the duration of permanent jobs, with shorter durations in the South. There is evidence suggesting that the subsidies implemented in Italy in 2015-2016 to promote permanent employment had positive effects on contract duration.