We investigate the effectiveness of European Structural Funds on employment, population and house prices in 325 Local Labor Markets (LLM) located in Southern Italy. We exploit the variability in disbursements between 2007 and 2013 and estimate the impact of the interventions by allowing for...

Using different data sources from local labour markets (LLMs) in Italy between 1971 and 2011, we document a number of stylized facts: a) local differences in the ratios of private employment to population are highly persistent; b) the population has a limited reaction to labour demand shocks,...

Using data from the Italian Survey on Household Income and Wealth from 1995 to 2014, we study the relation between informal credit (loans from relatives and friends) and a household's access to bank credit. While most of the literature has focused on the substitutability channel, we highlight...

Machine Learning (ML) can be a powerful tool to inform policy decisions. Those who are treated under a programme might have different propensities to put into practice the behaviour that the policymaker wants to incentivize. ML algorithms can be used to predict the policy-compliers; that is,...

We reassess the role of regional imbalances in explaining the high household income inequality in Italy. In the first part of the work we use the Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) to describe the trends in income inequality between and within areas since the early 2000s. We illustrate...

The paper estimates the local effects of urban regeneration policies by using evidence from interventions that took place in small and medium-sized cities in the Centre and North of Italy over the period 2008-12. By using an Oaxaca-Blinder reweighting estimator, we find little support for the...

We use Machine Learning (ML) predictive tools to propose a policy-assignment rule designed to increase the effectiveness of public guarantee programs. This rule can be used as a benchmark to improve targeting in order to reach the stated policy goals. Public guarantee schemes should target firms...

Subjective expectations about future policy play an important role in individuals' welfare. We examine how workers' expectations about pension reform vary with proximity to reforms, information cost, and aggregate information acquisition. We construct a new pan-European dataset of reform...

I estimate the effect of retirement on housework by exploiting the discontinuity in pension eligibility generated by the Italian social security rules. Using microdata from the 2007 wave of the Survey on Income and Living Conditions (SILC), I show that women increase their time spent on home...