Search

This project aims at testing the effectiveness of FOI law in Belgium by means of a field experiments on Belgian municipalities

The study aims to contribute to the existing experimental literature on FOIA compliance and concordance. The study proposes an experiment targeted at Italian municipalities. Such an experiment aims to check whether in case of a simple request of information by one citizen: 1) municipalities’ response rate is higher, and the responses are faster if the request includes a specific reference to FOIA law; 2) municipalities’ response rate is higher, and the responses are faster if the request includes a specific reference to the title of the requester (e.g., Avv - lawyer).

Il meridione paga le pensioni del produttivo nord? Inevitabilmente sì: difatti è questo ciò che succede in un sistema pensionistico pubblico che non discrimina per aspettativa di vita ma riconosce su di un territorio nazionale affetto da notevole eterogeneità nella speranza di vita le stesse regole a tutti. Con il risultato che gli sfaticati meridionali versano nelle casse dell’INPS più di quanto prendono, a favore dei diligenti cittadini lavoratori del nord che invece ne hanno un beneficio netto.

indagine sul rapporto fra intriduzione del reddito di cittadinanza e lavoro somemrso

Schools have been very central in the debate about COVID-19. On one hand, there have been many supporters of the argument to keep them open, for their importance for the youngsters, and for the effort many countries played in establishing protocols to keep them safe. On the other hand, a counter-argument supported by several other stakeholders, has been that being a major occasion of aggregation between teenager and adults accompanying their children, and being a major occasion of congestion per the public transportation, keeping the schools open favours the spread of the virus. In this article, by the means of a quantitative analysis that exploits the quasi experimental setting offered by the scattered opening that schools have had in Italy, we aim to shed some light on the subject. More precisely, a synthetic control method approach suggests that Bolzano, the first province in Italy to have opened the schools after the summer break, has way more cases than its synthetic counterfactual, built from a donor pool constituted by the other Italian provinces. Results seem to confirm that that opening the schools causes and increase in the infections, and this has to be taken into account by the policymakers.

A growing number of academic studies are devoting their attention to the study of the gender wage gap. This paper contributes to the literature by analyzing the existence of this gap specifically among those who hold the highest possible educational qualification, i.e. a PhD. The analysis relies on Italian crosssectional data collected through a highly representative survey of the employment conditions of PhD holders. The econometric analysis is carried out by means of OLS regression, Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition analysis and quantile decomposition. Findings suggest that a gender gap in hourly wages exists among PhD holders, that it lies approximately between 5% and 8%, with sizeable differences by sector of employment and field of specialization, and that such a gap is largely unexplained.

By relying on WVS data and using multilevel mixed modeling, the paper tests the hypothesis that access to larger flows of information about government fiscal accounts and financial transactions increases citizens’ willingness to pay taxes. By supporting such an hypothesis, our analysis suggests that in the presence of more information, the implicit contract between the government and taxpayers displays less stringent incentives and participation constraints and causes part of the contract, namely tax morale, to be enhanced. This finding supports the implementation of fiscal transparency policies, whose possible design is discussed.

Recent studies highlight that economic expectations are a crucial determinant of citizens’ satisfaction with democracy (SWD). This article relies on a cross-sectional analysis of European survey data collected in the aftermath of COVID-19 disease to investigate the relationship between citizens’ expectations about future economic prospects and their SWD. Our findings support the idea that citizens’ expectations about future economic prospects are correlated with SWD. Furthermore, they reveal that perceived conditions of material wellbeing moderate this relationship.

This paper investigates the effect of parents’ coproduction in online schooling on satisfaction with educational services during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using European cross country microdata from t...

This paper analyzes the role of fiscal transparency as a determinant of foreign direct investment (FDI) attractiveness. It proposes an empirical test based on a panel regression analysis on data from 72 countries in the 2006–2015 time span. The evidence supports the idea that countries characterized by higher levels of budget openness attract more FDI inflows. In more detail, a higher degree of transparency during the phase of budget execution is associated with increases of FDI inflows, even when the sample is restricted to non-OECD countries and low and lower-middle-income countries. The positive effect is robust to several different specifications and is found to be additional to the one of general government transparency. Moreover, we also show that the role played by fiscal transparency in attracting FDI is independent of other close institutional determinants like control of corruption and regulatory quality.

The investigation of the determinants of fiscal transparency has been mostly performed on cross-sectional data, and it has produced mixed results. This paper improves the existing literature by performing a static and dynamic panel analysis of the effect of a set of political variables on the level of fiscal transparency in 36 democratic countries. By using a recent measure of fiscal transparency based on IMF Governance Finance Statistics and available from 2003 to 2013, we find strong links between political environments and the dynamics of fiscal disclosure. Our results show that government control over the legislature exerts some negative effect on fiscal transparency, while the effect of government ideology is shown to be at least fragile. Furthermore we find that legislature fragmentation exerts a negative effect on fiscal transparency, which suggests that competition within the parliaments does not increase fiscal transparency, but instead it induces governments to react by reducing accessibility to information.