Suchergebnisse

In response to the rapid spread of COVID-19, governments across the globe have implemented local lockdowns that have led to increased unemployment and have disrupted local and international transport routes and supply chains. Whilst such efforts aim to slow or stop the spread of the SARSCoV-2 virus, they have also resulted in increased food insecurity, whether due to reduced incomes or increased food prices. This is the first paper to track food insecurity and its determinants during the pandemic using multi-country and multi-wave evidence. Using data from 11 countries and up to 6 waves of High-Frequency Phone Survey data (household-level surveys) on COVID-19 and its impacts, we use a fixed-effects linear probability model to investigate the socioeconomic determinants of food insecurity during the pandemic for each country using household-level data over multiple waves. We control for socioeconomic characteristics including gender and education of the household head; income and poverty status of the households during the pandemic; safety nets in the form of cash and food assistance; coping strategies adopted by households; and price effects of major food items. Our findings suggest that cash safety nets appear to have been more effective than food in terms of reducing food insecurity during the pandemic; and that those particularly hard hit are female headed households (highest in Malawi: 0.541, 95% CI 0.516, 0.569; lowest in Cambodia: 0.023, 95% CI 0.022, 0.024), the less educated (highest in Djibouti: − 0.232, 95% CI − 0.221, − 0.244; lowest in Nigeria: 0.006, 95% CI − 0.005, − 0.007), and poorer households (highest in Mali: 0.382, 95% CI 0.364, 0.402; lowest in Chad: 0.135, 95% CI 0.129, 0.142). In line with the existing literature, our results show that, even controlling for income loss and poverty status, those households who had to borrow rather than rely on savings had a higher probability of suffering from food insecurity. Distinct differences in the efficacy of safety nets across the 11 countries, and ...

The paper shows the impact of privatization and liberalization on consumers in the telecommunication sector for 15 EU countries. Policy reforms are summarized by the OECD regulatory indicators (REGREF) that consider the extent of privatization, vertical disintegration, and market entry. After controlling for other country variables, first, a test of the impact of ownership and regulatory changes on consumer prices is given. In the second step, the Eurobarometer data on consumers' satisfaction about quality and prices of the telecommunication service are considered. The analysis confirms the importance of market regulation in reducing prices but minimizes the role played by privatization per se. Overall, the findings offer only mixed evidence, and somehow contradict, the hypothesis that all the reforms work in a similar way across the EU countries.

Using transaction data from Belgium, we provide a descriptive comparison of trade in goods and trade in services at the firm level. From a static perspective, we find that firms trading services are fewer and export and import smaller values than those trading goods. This is because they trade fewer products, with less countries, making fewer transactions and these gaps are only partially counterbalanced by larger transaction values. Instead, firms trading both services and goods are even rarer, but they account for a substantial share of total trade. In the time dimension, services traders experience higher entry and exit rates and a lower survival probability. However, the surviving firms grow more rapidly than those trading goods thanks to an increase in the number of transactions per product-market. Finally, we observe that firms that trade only services add also goods in their export and import basket and vice versa. This is a further important growth channel for firms in international markets.

Public procurement from Big Science Centers (BSCs) yields a variety of spillover effects that can ultimately have growth enhancing consequences for their Member States (MS). We study the determinants of procurement for the biggest research infrastructure ever built: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. A unique database of firms that have registered to become industrial partners of the LHC program allows us to estimate the determinants for potential suppliers of receiving an order from CERN. We compare the relative weight of firms' technological features and CERN's procurement rules aimed at securing a juste retour for its MS. While, in accordance to CERN's procurement rules our results highlight the role of both technological factors and political constraints, we also show the existence of a premium toward Swiss and French firms. We document that the constraints related with the achievement of a juste retour affect -- directly or indirectly -- the procurement policy of many European BSCs and international bodies whose budget is financed by the public funds of their MS. Therefore, our results have policy implications that go beyond our empirical application.

COVID-19 lockdowns make it possible to investigate the extent to which an unprecedented increase in renewables' penetration may have brought unexpected limitations and vulnerabilities of current power systems to the surface. We empirically investigate how power systems in five European countries have dealt with this unexpected shock, drastically changing electricity load, the scheduling of dispatchable generation technologies, electricity day-ahead wholesale prices, and balancing costs. We find that low-cost dispatchable generation from hydro and nuclear sources has fulfilled most of the net-load even during peak hours, replacing more costly fossil-based generation. In Germany, the UK, and Spain coal power plants stood idle, while gas-fired generation has responded in heterogeneous ways across power systems. Falling operational costs of generators producing at the margin and lower demand, both induced by COVID-19 lockdowns, have significantly decreased wholesale prices. Balancing and other ancillary services' markets have provided the flexibility required to respond to the exceptional market conditions faced by the grid. Balancing costs for flexibility services have increased heterogeneously across countries, while ancillary markets' costs, measured only in the case of Italy, have increased substantially. Results provide valuable evidence on current systems' dynamics during high renewables' shares and increased demand volatility. New insights into the market changes countries will be facing in the transition towards a clean, secure, and affordable power system are offered.

We measure ingroup bias in the context of real social groups operating in a slum and investigate which ingroup members' features affect it. We find that higher homogeneity within the group and stronger relationship with the super-categorized group (the community of people living in the slum) significantly reduce the gap between outgroup versus ingroup donations.

Growing Euroscepticism across the European Union (EU) leaves open questions as to what citizens expect to gain from EU Membership and what influences their dissent for EU integration. This paper looks at the EU Structural Funds, one of the largest and most visible expenditure items in the EU budget, to test their impact on electoral support for the EU. By leveraging the Referendum on Brexit held in the United Kingdom, a spatial RDD analysis offers causal evidence that EU money does not influence citizens' support for the EU. Conversely, the analysis shows that EU funds mitigate Euroscepticism only where they are coupled with tangible improvements in local labour market conditions, the ultimate objective of this form of EU intervention. Money cannot buy love for the EU, but its capacity to generate new local opportunities certainly can.

Persistence of inequality across generations is an important field of research with many implications in terms of policy. Economic inequality related to the intergenerational transmission of economic opportunities may strongly influence policies designed to reduce earnings or wealth concentration. Empirical research has usually focused on the intergenerational persistence of earnings or income, considered as good measures of differences in economic well-being and consumption capacity of individuals. On the contrary, only a limited number of recent studies attempt to estimate the degree of intergenerational mobility by using net wealth as a measure of economic status of individuals. This Ph.D thesis includes three autonomous chapters regarding the intergenerational persistence of wealth and earnings inequality and their mechanisms. The first one reviews research on wealth inequality and persistence across two or more generations. Broadly speaking, wealth is more unequally distributed than income and unlike other flow variables, may be transmitted across generations directly, by means of bequests or donations. This means that it may be a good proxy of permanent economic disparities. Unfortunately, measuring wealth is not an easy task since data on real and financial assets are incomplete and provided with many differences across countries. Regarding the extent of correlation in wealth across generations, only a limited number of studies are able to use suitable data on wealth which cover two or more generations. In any case, according to few recent empirical works, intergenerational rank correlations in wealth seem to be usually higher than intergenerational rank correlations in income. These findings derive from the fact that wealth is more representative of cumulate resources and less affected by transitory shocks than earnings or income. Moreover, wealthy parents seem to transmit many resources to their children at the beginning of the adulthood, by making donations. This may explain why, unlike intergenerational correlations in income, intergenerational correlations in wealth seem to be very high also considering children in their 20's. The second chapter exploits retrospective socio-economic information about both parents to impute parental wealth in order to assess the degree of wealth mobility across generations in Italy and highlight some of the mechanisms linking parental wealth to offspring's economic outcomes. Using the Bank of Italy's survey on household income and wealth (SHIW) and two samples of offspring and pseudo-parents in their 40s, I find an intergenerational age-adjusted wealth elasticity (IWE) of 0.451 and a rank-rank slope of 0.349 which appear to be robust to the use of different predictors of parental economic status. These results suggest that Italy is a low mobility country also when wealth is taken as an alternative measure of economic status. As in the only previous study by Boserup et al. (2016) which analyses the pattern of wealth mobility over the lifecycle, the second chapter shows a U-shaped pattern of the intergenerational wealth correlation as a function of the second generation's age with higher estimated intergenerational correlations when children are taken at the beginning of their adulthood or in their 40's. Geographical differences in the extent of intergenerational wealth mobility are analysed by estimating elasticities and rank-rank slopes in two different macro-areas of the country. Results suggest that the southern part of Italy is extremely less mobile than the northern part of the country. Regarding the analysis of the mechanisms behind the intergenerational wealth correlation across two generations, the second chapter suggests that income seems to be the main intergenerational mediating factor. On the contrary, the correlation across generations of saving preferences and attitude to risk seems to explain only a small fraction of the IWE. Finally, the third chapter (which is part of a research work with Michele Raitano and Teresa Barbieri) provides new and detailed estimates of intergenerational earnings mobility in Italy and sheds light on mechanisms behind the association of gross earnings between fathers and sons. Being not available panel data following subsequent generations in Italy, we make use of a recently built dataset that merges information provided by IT-SILC 2005 (i.e., the Italian component of EU-SILC 2005) with detailed information about the whole working life of those interviewed in IT-SILC recorded in the administrative archives managed by the Italian national Social Security Institute (INPS). This dataset allows us to rely on the two-sample two-stage least squares method (TSTSLS) to predict father earnings and, then, compute point in time intergenerational elasticities (IGE) and imputed rank-rank slopes. Furthermore, the characteristics of the dataset allow us to extend point in time estimates considering, for both sons and "pseudo-fathers", average earnings in a 5-year period and observing sons at various ages, thus assessing the robustness of our estimates to attenuation and life cycle biases. Confirming previous evidence (Mocetti 2007; Piraino 2007), we find that Italy is characterized by a relatively high earnings elasticity in cross country comparison – the size of the estimated β is usually over 0.40 – and the size of the intergenerational association increases when older sons and multi-annual averages are considered. We then investigate mechanisms behind this association both: i) including a set of possible mediating factors of the parental influence (e.g., sons' education, occupation, labour market experience) among the control variables when regressing sons' earnings on fathers' earnings and ii) following the sequential decomposition approach suggested by Blanden, Gregg and Macmillan (2007). Results show that a limited share of the intergenerational association is attributable to sons' educational and occupational attainment, while the largest part of the association is mediated by sons' employability, i.e., by their effective experience since the entry in the labour market. Results show that the mediating role of education in Italy is limited, especially if compared with evidence obtained for other countries such as the US and UK.

Nowadays, as stressed by important strategic documents like for instance the 2009 EU White Paper on Adaptation or the recent 2009 "Copenhagen Accord", it is amply recognized that both mitigation and adaptation strategies are necessary to combat climate change. This paper enriches the rapidly expanding literature trying to devise normative indications on the optimal combination of the two introducing the role of catastrophic and spatial uncertainty related to climate change damages. Applying a modified version of the Nordhaus' Regional Dynamic Integrated Model of Climate and the Economy it is shown that in both cases uncertainty works in the direction to make mitigation a more attractive strategy than adaptation. When catastrophic uncertainty is concerned mitigation becomes relatively more important as, by curbing emissions, it helps to reduce temperature increase and hence the probability of the occurrence of the event. Adaptation on the contrary has no impact on this. It is also shown that optimal mitigation responses are much less sensitive than adaptation responses to spatial uncertainty. Mitigation responds to global damages, while adaptation to local damages. The first, being aggregated, change less than the second in the presence of spatial uncertainty as higher expected losses in some regions are compensated by lower expected losses in other. Accordingly, mitigation changes less than adaptation. Thus if it cannot be really claimed that spatial uncertainty increases the weight of mitigation respect to that of adaptation, however its presence makes mitigation a "safer" or more robust strategy to a policy decision maker than adaptation

In accordance with the Concept of state family policy in the Russian Federation for the period up to 2025, the development of the system of state support for families with children is one of the main tasks of the state family policy. Despite the fact that in the years 2000-2013. there was a significant reduction of poverty, the poverty rate among families with children continues to be quite high: in 2014, 18.5% against 11% among the general population. In this regard, particularly relevant is the assessment of the impact of implemented measures of social support for families with children on their well-being. The object of study in this paper is the social support of families with children in Russia (on the example of the pilot regions - the Altai Territory and Samara Region). Spend analysis of the legislation governing the provision of social support to families with children of measures, quantitative survey of families with children and interviews with the staff of the bodies and institutions of social protection.

Policy makers have implemented a set of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to contain the spread of Covid-19 and reduce the burden on health systems. These restrictive measures have had adverse effects on economic activity; however, these negative impacts differ with respect to each country. Based on daily data, this article studies governmental economic responses to the application of NPIs for 59 countries. Furthermore, we assess if these economic responses differ according to the economic and sectoral context of the countries. By applying a counting model to the economic support intensity, our results quantify the average reaction of governments in counterbalancing the imposition of NPIs. We further re-estimate the base model by dividing the countries according to their GDP per capita, the intensity of their service sectors, and the expenditure by tourists. Our results show how each NPI implied a different level of economic support and how the structural characteristics considered were relevant to the decision-making process.

Coastal social-ecological systems (SES) are home to over 500 million people and one of the most productive and diverse ecosystems in the world. In recent years, coastal SES are experiencing severe threat from an increasing population, resource exploitation, and global environmental change (e.g. climate change), which have devastating societal impacts in coastal areas. Despite several global, national, and local initiatives, there is a growing consensus that coastal resources are depleting and increasing conflicts in coastal areas. Recognizing the global call to understand social–ecological interactions for implementing development practices, this special issue features a suite (seven) of articles advancing the understanding of the sustainability of social and ecological interactions within coastal areas through theoretical SES approaches and related analytical methods. In this editorial of this special issue, we also argued that coastal area needs to define from SES perspectives, which have received less attention compared to ecological and social perspectives. We hope that this special issue will stimulate the debate and further thinking of how coastal SES can be managed sustainably by conceptualizing and understanding the complex dynamics (interaction, feedback) of SES.

ABSTRACT Relational networks and intangible factors are crucial elements for the competitiveness of a territory. Public–Private–Partnerships (PPPs), in particular, allow for the provision of goods and services that favour the exploitation of complementarities between public and private resources. They aim at promoting an increase in the overall efficiency of investment projects through a complex mechanism that distributes risk and revenues among stakeholders. This paper examines the local and territorial determinants of PPPs through an econometric analysis based upon Italian municipal data, grouped at the provincial level. Using a tobit model, we analyse the relationship between the realization of successful PPP initiatives and different sets of factors, including less analysed local and territorial determinants. We stress the role of the local management of infrastructure assets, the administrative efficiency of local authorities and the diffusion of previous local development initiatives. Local management and territorial context factors explain most of the occurrence of successful PPP initiatives in the pre-crisis period while usual determinants (infrastructure endowment and financial distress) display a weaker effect.

This paper analyzes the impact of immigration on the dynamics of the cross-sectional distribution of GSP per capita and per worker. To achieve this we combine different approaches: on the one hand, we establish via Instrumental Variable estimation the effect of the inflow of foreign- born workers on output per worker, employment and population; on the other hand, using the Distribution Dynamics approach, we reconstruct the consequences of migration flows on convergence dynamics across US states.

We examine whether investor mood, driven by World Health Organization (WHO) alerts and media news on dangerous infectious diseases, is priced in pharmaceutical companies' stocks in the United States. We argue that disease-related news (DRNs) should not trigger rational trading. We find that DRNs have a positive and significant sentiment effect among investors (on Wall Street). The effect is stronger (weaker) for small (large) companies, who are less (more) likely to engage in the development of new vaccines. A potential negative investor climate (on Main Street) – induced by disease-related fear – does not alter the positive sentiment effect.