Suchergebnisse

"When the introduction of board gender quotas was first discussed in Italy a decade ago, those in favor of quotas relied on nonacademic results from consultancy companies claiming that a higher share of women would "lead" to substantial better performance. The arguments against gender quotas were dominated by the defense of "meritocracy", arguing that quotas contravene meritocracy because they risk promoting less qualified individuals and thus reducing the quality of board members. I was puzzled. The argument in favor was not convincing, since it was based on a simple correlation, which is different from causality. The one against was misplaced: Why do we talk about the quality of women if the quality of men has never been an issue? Moreover, since highly qualified women are abundant, why should the promotion of women reduce quality? At that time, together with some co-authors, I contributed to the production of new evidence in the political sphere, showing in a causal way (i.e., using a rigorous analysis) that the introduction of gender quotas in candidate lists increased - rather than decreased - the quality of elected politicians. The rationale for gender quotas changed: policy-makers stopped using unreliable correlations between female representation and performance to justify gender quotas and realized that gender quotas do not contravene meritocracy but rather enhance it"--

A recent Italian law mandates a temporary increased representation of women on boards of publicly-listed and state-owned companies. While traditionally a poor performer on gender issues, this new law has the potential to make Italy a prominent world player in equality between the sexes. Women Directors analyzes the Italian law on gender quotas in boards as a vital opportunity for the country and a key international case. It provides a broad perspective of the new Italian experience, which has the potential to influence the way of addressing gender quota issues worldwide. The key elements of the Italian approach, which include the interaction between public and private spheres, the prompting of an intense debate, the promotion of meritocracy consistently with the emergence of female talents, contribute to spread the impact of the Italian law beyond the country, beyond the period of implementation of the law and beyond the mere increase of the number of women in boards.

Abstract
The outbreak of COVID-19 has affected men and women worldwide. The gender dimension of COVID-19 has attracted the attention of researchers and policymakers: while women seem to be less severely hit by the virus and are more compliant with the restricting rules imposed to reduce the spread of the contagion, they risk to suffer more the economic consequences of the pandemic, because they are more vulnerable on the labor market and because they are carrying on most of the burden of housework and childcare which increased substantially during the lockdown. Public policies are required to address the emergency and to deal with its gender implications. Anecdotal evidence suggests that women leaders have performed better than men in dealing with the emergency. This paper explores the evidence on the gender dimension of the pandemic under a new perspective proposed by Profeta (2020), focused on the double relationship between gender equality and public policy: on one side, I show which policies can support gender equality in times of COVID-19 and, on the other side, I explore whether women leadership can promote successful measures. While the evidence provided is only suggestive, future studies should assess causal relationships. (JEL codes: J16 and J18)

In 2001 the Italian government introduced a personal income tax reform to be implemented in successive phases. In 2004 taxes were reduced to all income levels with higher gains for low-income and high-income individuals than for middle-income ones. A large debate arised. This paper explores the political economy reasons under this tax reform, mainly the attempt of the government to attract the uncertain voters (swing voters). A probabilistic voting model is introduced to capture the importance of swing voters. The model predicts that the average personal income tax rate tends to be lower for groups of lower income, higher preference for leisure and containing more politically mobile voters (swing voters). However, data from Italian polls show that, while the tax reform was a good strategy to attract swing voters, the specific design of the reform, which favored high-income and low-income individuals, but not the middle class, was not the more appropriate strategy. Adapted from the source document.

¿Porqué existen programas de seguridad social que transfieren recursos desde los trabajadores a los mayores? (ii) ¿Porqué los programas de seguridad social preveen que para cobrar la pensión los trabajadores tienen que jubilarse? (iii) ¿Cuál es el impacto del proceso de envejecimiento de la población sobre la jubilación y la seguridad social? (iv) ¿Cuál es la evidencia empírica sobre la importancia de la finámica demográfica como determinante de la jubilación y de la seguridad social en el mundo? Esta tesis contribuye a contestar a estas preguntas en un contexto político-económico. Primero, examina el estado del arte, y las principales contribuciones en la literatura de los modelos político-económico de la seguridad social. Segundo, considera los elementos políticos que relacionan la seguridad social con la jubilación, desarrollando un modelo de votación`probabilística. Una hipótesis crucial es que el tiempo libre en la edad mayor representa un "merit good", es decir un bien que tiene valor positivo para todos los agentes en la sociedad (jóvenes y viejos). En consecuencia, los jóvenes inducen los políticos a establecer un impuesto positivo sobre la renta laboral de los viejos, que los induce a retirarse. Esto aumenta el nivel de homogeneidad ideológica de los viejos, y por lo tanto su poder político para obtener una transferencia desde los jóvenes. Tercero, la tesis examina el nivel de equilibrio de jubilación y de seguridad social en un contexto económico y demográfico, desarrollando un modelo a generaciones solapadas con grupos de interés. El modelo estudia la solución política que sandrá cuando la proporción de viejos en la población aumentará. Cuarto, la tesis ofrece nuevas evidencias sobre los determinantes del nivel de jubilación y de seguridad social en el mundo, construyendo un nuevo data set que incluye las informaciones sobre demografía, jubilación y seguridad social para muchos paises.

Abstract
We investigate the role of time pressure in originating gender gaps in math tests. In a randomized experiment, college students took a 20-question math test under high, low or no time pressure. Reducing or eliminating time pressure decreases the math gender gap by up to 40%. Larger gaps under time pressure are mostly due to increased anxiety rather than to students' modifying their test-taking strategies. The correlation between math tests' scores and university performance is equally high under the different scenarios. Hence, less time pressure may increase gender equality in math subjects with no effect on the selection process.

How do electoral rules affect the representation of women? We collect panel data on the universe of Italian politicians from all levels of government over the period 1987-2013 and obtain a complete picture of the career paths of male and female politicians across the whole arc of their careers in public office. We use our unique dataset to analyse the effects on female political representation of an Italian reform which, in 2005, changed the electoral rule for national elections from (mostly) majoritarian to proportional, but did not affect sub-national level elections. We find that proportional electoral rules favour the election of women. We propose a new channel through which this result is obtained, related to the different nature of political competition in the two electoral systems: under proportional rules, parties place women less frequently in competitive seats. This is consistent with the fact that proportional systems value gender diversity more than majoritarian ones, while majoritarian systems rely on head-to-head electoral races, which are not gender neutral. We also find that electoral rules have weaker effects on female representation in geographical areas where traditional gender roles are dominant.

This paper studies the transmission mechanism from family culture to economic institutions, by analyzing the impact of the within family organization on the original design of the public pension systems. We build a simple OLG model with families featuring either weak or strong internal ties. When pensions systems are initially introduced, in society with strong ties they replicate the tight link between generations by providing earnings related benefits; whereas in societies with weak family ties they only act as a safety net. To test this transition mechanism, we consider Todd (1982) historical classification of family types across countries. We find that in societies dominated by absolute nuclear families (i.e., weak family ties), pension systems act as a flat safety net entailing a large within-cohort redistribution, and viceversa in societies characterized by stronger family ties where pension systems are more generous. This link between the type of families and the design of pension systems is robust to testing for alternative explanations, such as legal origin, religion, urbanization and democratization of the country at the time of their introduction. Interestingly, historical family types matter for explaining the design of the pension systems, which represents a persistent feature, but not their size, which have largely changed over time.