This paper exploits discontinuities in the assigment of scholarships targeted at low income students in an Italian University in order to evaluate the effects of monetary incentives on students' academic achievement. Results reveal positive and sizeable causal effects both in terms of credits...

We study the role and design of private and public insurance programs when informal care is uncertain. Children's degree of altruism is randomly distributed over some interval. Social insurance helps parents who receive a low level of care, but it comes at the cost of crowding out informal care....

One key element in the reduction of poverty and (in Latin America) inequality has been the achievement of greater fiscal equity; we analyse one key part of this process, which is the earmarking of portions of tax revenue to be spent on progressive public expenditures such as social protection,...

Using comparable fiscal incidence analysis, this paper examines the impact of fiscal policy on inequality and poverty in 25 countries for around 2010. Success in fiscal redistribution is driven primarily by redistributive effort (share of social spending to GDP in each country) and the extent to...

Current trends in the distribution of wealth trigger a social divide and threaten democracy in many advanced economies. I propose to counter this evolution by enhancing the role of public capital as a redistribution and empowerment device. The governance of public capital requires two novel...

At the start of the XXI century, characterized by the rise of new forms of employment and of skills requirements, many countries need to adapt their labor market institutions to accompany technological changes and globalization. In this context, unemployment insurance is an essential tool to...

This paper examines the effectiveness of active labour market policies (ALMPs) in improving labour market outcomes, especially of low-skilled individuals, by means of a pooled cross-country and time series database for 31 advanced countries during the period 1985-2010. The analysis includes...

This paper provides a normative justification for the use of a minimum wage as a redistributive tool in a competitive labor market. We show that a government interested in improving the wellbeing of the deserving poor, while being less concerned with their undeserving counterparts, can use a...

This paper examines the determinants of social spending in Latin America during the period 1990-2012 and how they differed between the years of the Washington Consensus (1990-2000) and the period that followed (2001-2012). Special attention is also paid to the evaluation of convergence towards a...

This paper compares the runoff system and the plurality rule in terms of the size and composition of public expenditures. I use the change in the voting rule in Italian municipalities at 15,000 residents to implement a regression discontinuity design. The results show that municipalities under...