Quaderni di Dipartimento [serie ordinaria – Anno 2021]

This paper presents a meta-analysis on the effects of retirement on health. We select academic papers published between 2000 and 2021 studying the impact of retirement on physical and mental health, self-assessed general health, healthcare utilization and mortality. Among 275 observations from 85 articles, 28% (13%) find positive (negative) effects of retirement on health outcomes. Almost 60% of the observations do not provide statistically significant findings. Using meta-regression analysis, we checked for the presence of publication bias after distinguishing among different journal subject areas and, once correcting for it, we find that the average effect of retirement on health outcomes is small and barely significant. We apply several model averaging techniques to explore possible sources of heterogeneity and our results suggest that the different estimated effects can be explained by the differences in both health measurements and retirement schemes.

Propensity Score Matching is a popular approach to evaluate treatment effects in observational studies. However, when building the underlying propensity score model practitioners often overlook the issue of model uncertainty and its consequences. We tackle this problem by Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) with an application to the 2014 Italian tax credit reform (the so-called "Renzi bonus"). Model uncertainty has a great impact on the estimated treatment effects. BMA-based estimates point towards a significant effect of the rebate on food consumption only for liquidity constrained house-holds; conversely, model selection procedures sometimes produce results incompatible with the consumption smoothing hypothesis.

Italy was the first European country to experience a huge outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and to implement various policies in order to contain the spread of the virus. This paper analyses the effects of policies implemented by the Italian government in response to the virus's spread in the first and the second wave of the pandemic. We analyse 307 municipalities of the Friuli-Venezia-Giulia and Umbria regions from 2 April 2020 to 7 February 2021. Our results show that the first relaxation policy implemented immediately after the lockdown had only a slight impact on the virus's spread. Moreover, we find that the mild restriction policy (orange zone) implemented during the second wave in Umbria was successful in containing the virus’s spread in November 2020. However, this policy proved to be ineffective in countering new, more contagious variants of the virus.

We present a meta-analysis on the debate about the “stepping stone vs. dead end'” hypothesis related to the causal effect of temporary jobs on future labour
market performances. We select academic papers published on international peer-reviewed journals from 1990 until 2021. Among 78 observations from 64
articles, 32% support the hypothesis according to which temporary contracts are a port of entry into stable employment positions, 23% report ambiguous or
mixed findings, and the remaining 45% provide evidence in favour of the dead end hypothesis. The results from meta-regressions suggest that the stepping
stone effect is more likely to emerge when self-selectivity issues are dealt with, especially when using the timing-of-events approach. The studies focusing on
temporary work agency jobs and casual/seasonal jobs detect more easily results in favour of the dead end hypothesis. Finally, in more recent years and when
the unemployment rate is larger, the dead end hypothesis is more likely to prevail.

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the risk of participating in public events, among them elections. We assess whether the voter turnout in the 2020 local government elections in Italy was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. We do so by exploiting the variation among municipalities in the intensity of the COVID-19 outbreak as measured by the mortality rate among the elderly. We find that a 1 percentage point increase in the elderly mortality rate decreased the voter turnout by 0.5 percentage points, with no gender differences in the behavioural response. The effect was especially strong in densely populated municipalities. We do not detect statistically significant heterogeneous effects between the North and the South or among different levels of autonomy from the central government.

This article reviews the empirical literature on unemployment scarring effects. Our goal is twofold: on the one hand, to present an overview of empirical evidence relating to the impact of unemployment spells on subsequent labour market career; on the other hand, to provide a review of the econometric strategies mainly adopted to estimate the causal impact of such unemployment episodes. Focusing on a final sample of 63 papers, the empirical evidence appears
homogeneous in highlighting significant and persistent wage losses and strong state dependence.

In this paper we present a model where frictions in the supervision process may set the stage for strategic complementarities among banks. We derive
the conditions for strategic complementarities in the behavior of banks in a banking system in which the supervisory authority has a budget constraint
on the resources to allocate for monitoring, and supervision is costly for banks. In such a framework, the goal of macroprudential policies consists in
simultaneously restraining the incentive of banks in extending risky loans, without forcing the system towards a corner solution where all or none of
the banks provide credit. We point out that the countercyclical buer is a proper tool to reduce the number of banks issuing a higher amount of credit
during booms, while a loan-support-program can increase the number of banks issuing higher credit during downturns.

The decision to end a marriage may depend on economic reasons such as more advantageous tax breaks obtained through a divorce. The paper examines the role played by property tax in influencing decisions of marital separation and divorce in Italian municipalities over the years 2001-2007.
Empirical analysis shows that there is a significant increase in divorces and marital separations as the difference between the municipal secondary and primary home tax rate increases. Women are more inclined than men to separate and divorce when the municipal property tax rates differences become larger.

This paper develops and estimates a macroeconomic model of real-financial markets interactions in which the behaviour of banks generates endogenous business cycles. We do so in the context of a computational agent-based framework, where the channelling of funds from depositors to investors occurring through intermediaries nformation and matching frictions.
Since banks compete in both deposit and credit markets, the whole dynamic is driven by endogenous fluctuations in their profits. In particular, we assume that intermediaries adopt a simple learning process, which consists of copying the strategy of the most profitable competitors while setting their interest rates.
Accordingly, the emergence of strategic complementarity – mainly due to the accumulation of information capital – leads to periods of sustained growth followed by sharp recessions in the simulated economy.

We evaluate the effectiveness of placing microchips on the bags for the curbside collection in reducing the unsorted urban solid waste and increasing the fraction recycled. The microchip allows the waste collection company to identify the users that left the bags on the curb and check whether they properly sorted the waste. Our study is carried out in the Italian province of Macerata (Marche, Italy), where the bag microchips were introduced only in some municipalities in 2013. Exploiting monthly information on waste collection and natural experiment methods, we find that, two years after the programme start, the bag microchip increased the fraction recycled by 3-4.5 percentage points and decreased the monthly unsorted waste by 1-2 kilograms per capita.

What is the impact of immigration on the product mix of the receiving economy? To answer this question we exploit variation in the presence of immigrants across Italian provinces within the period 2003-2011. We find that immigration changes the manufacturing output composition of Italian provinces in favour of less capital intensive products, without affecting the total amount of manufacturing production. This result is based on a 2SLS strategy resting on the settlement of immigrants in the pre-sample period and is in line with the predictions of standard trade models concerning the role of factor growth on product specialisation. More specifically, immigrants sustain and deepen Italy's revealed comparative advantages in labour intensive goods. We thus add to the existing studies finding within-industry adjustments of factor usage in production rather than between-industry output adjustments in response to immigration flows. When searching for the underlying mechanisms driving our result, we discover that a larger share of immigrants promotes the local reshoring of labour intensive
productions and fosters the creation of new firms in labour intensive industries.