In the last 30 years the Italian pension system was repeatedly reformed and counter-reformed, increasing uncertainty about future pensions. A low level of financial literacy exacerbated this problem. In 2015, the Italian Social Security Institute (INPS) launched a project to allow all insured...

This paper investigates the effect of the lockdown on COVID-19 infections. After the 22nd of March 2020, the Italian government shut down many economic activities to limit the contagion. Sectors deemed essentials for the economy were, however, allowed to remain active. We exploit the...

This paper investigates the impact of business property taxation on firms' performance using a panel of Italian manufacturing firms. To account for endogeneity in local taxation, we exploit a pairwise spatial differenced generalized method of moments estimator. As well as providing robust...

We analyze voluntary coalition formation using a unique panel data for 1,056 municipalities in the French region of Brittany between 1995 and 2002. We use a control function approach to develop a binary discrete choice model with spatial interactions. We find that a municipality's decision to...

This paper analyses how in utero exposure to maternal stress from WWII affects long-term health and economic outcomes and describes different mechanisms at work, showing that current health conditions are heterogeneously related to the type of fetal stressor.We exploit the Italian armistice of...

This paper examines the effects of in-utero exposure to stress on lifelong labor market outcomes. We exploit a unique natural experiment that involved randomly placed Nazi raids on municipalities in Italy during WWII. We use administrative data on the universe of private sector workers in Italy...

Cooperation among local governments has been encouraged to enable the aggregation of resources and improved public sector efficiency. However, if cooperation through the joint delivery of local public services is likely to be welfare enhancing for the agglomeration, but will lead to losses for...

Flexible work arrangements are on the rise in many countries, ranging from Germany's mini-jobs to UK's zero-hours contracts. These contracts allow for quick labor demand adjustments and are also seen as a way to discourage undeclared work, and more than 10 years ago Italy introduced what was...

Flexible work arrangements are on the rise in many countries, ranging from Germany's mini-jobs to UK's zero-hours contracts. These contracts allow for quick labor demand adjustments and are also seen as a way to discourage undeclared work, and more than 10 years ago Italy introduced what was...