Italian Economic Journal最新文献

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.

Abstract

This paper provides a simple political economy model of hierarchical education to study the endogenous determination of the public education budget and its allocation between different tiers of education (basic and advanced). The model integrates private education decisions by allowing parents, who are differentiated according to income and human capital, to opt out of the public system and enrol their offspring at private universities. Majority voting decides the size of the budget allocated to education and the expenditure composition. The model exhibits a potential for multiple equilibria and ‘low education’ traps. Income inequality and the intergenerational persistence of educational attainments play a fundamental role in deciding the equilibrium. The main predictions of the theory are broadly consistent with descriptive cross-country evidence collected for 43 high-middle income countries.

The school-to-work transition in Italy is very long. In this paper, we measure the differences in the school-to-work duration for Italian graduates in the STEM and non-STEM fields using data from the ISTAT Professional integration of Graduates survey. We used different parametric and non-parametric approaches based on survival analysis. In particular, through competitive risk analysis, we control even the possibility that the job search ends with a transition to the status of inactivity, still very frequent among Italian people, especially women. Further, we compare STWT durations conditioned to several relevant characteristics. We find that the STWT has an average duration of 14 months for those who graduated in health sciences, 24 for other scientific fields, and more than two years for those graduating in a humanities field. Other significant differences arise when we account for gender, especially when we consider an exit from the STWT for inactivity, for region of residence, family background, and even for active participation in university activities. Further, the analysis highlights the existence of a dual labor market, with shorter transitions to stable and satisfactory jobs and longer transitions for jobs with opposite characteristics. The findings open up many policy implications. Actions that could help in reducing the duration of the STWT are: stimulating more young people, in particular women, to choose STEM disciplines; reducing the Italian territorial divide, reinforcing universities in the South and their connections with the productive system, incentivizing students to actively participate in courses, and other activities.

We develop an endogenous growth model to simulate the long-term impact of Italy's National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) on the persistent North–South productivity gap. Our model underscores public investment as a catalyst for sustained economic growth and highlights the reliance of local government quality on the surrounding social capital. In regions with low social capital, local investment management diminishes efficiency due to prevalent misappropriation. In contrast, centralized management enhances the effectiveness of public action in these situations. The NRRP's overall effect therefore relies on the government level to which investment management is assigned. Our quantitative exercises show that compared to centralization, decentralization weakens the NRRP's impact on the relative position of the South. However, even under our best scenario—centralized management—the NRRP only slightly reduces the North–South productivity ratio from 75 to 76.4%. Finally, our research highlights the pivotal role of a reform aimed at maintaining central control over Southern public investments well beyond 2026, when the NRRP's actions and governance are due to stop. This type of reform can potentially yield more substantial, positive, and lasting impacts on the South region.

EU fiscal rules have been suspended until 2024. European policymakers are considering whether to reinstate the existing fiscal rules or to define a new framework. Member States must have enough fiscal space. But the sustainability of public debt must be safeguarded. We use a nonlinear dynamic model to test if a primary balance adjustment rule can preserve debt sustainability in the presence of interactions between fiscal policy, economic growth, and interest rates. We find that a dynamic adjustment rule to changes in debt service can reduce the equilibrium debt ratio, even stabilizing the associated risk premium.

How does Italy position inside the European structure of trade relationships? How labour bilateral flows have changed over time? Which type of employment activity has been outsourced? Which insourced? Focusing on a three-country perspective, what are the employment bilateral relationships between Italy-Germany-Poland (descending periphery-core-ascending periphery)? To address these questions we develop a novel set of bilateral labour dependence indicators inside I-O production networks. Overall, we provide evidence of the reconfiguration of Italy as falling into the trap of GVC downgrading, with an increasing number of trade relationships in employment requirements, particularly in the most strategic productions, as insourced from abroad. The offshoring strategy conducted so far has resulted in a weakening of its internal production capacity and employment absorption, even more harshly when compared to other European countries.