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Population aging is a very relevant phenomenon affecting the health care system. Raising life expectancy is certainly a goal, but the elderly are fragile and need frequent health care, with high costs for the public health care system. Hence, active aging becomes a fundamental objective to improve life quality, while programs promoting health literacy among population can determine effective cost savings. Local health care service in Piedmont Region (NW Italy) promote active aging through APA, Adapted Physical Activity. It is a protocol of physical non-clinical exercises to be carried out in small groups, aimed at changing people lifestyle and specially addressed to the elderly, who show reduced motility due to sedentary lifestyle and mild chronic conditions. This contribution proposes a methodological reflection on RIMA, an experimental research project, which is currently in progress and has two primary objectives: o Analyzing the impact of APA as a prevention tool devoted to active ageing; o Based on impact results, developing a cost-benefit analysis, with the aim of providing local health care service and other stakeholders with strategic information, which is useful for planning health promotion activities targeting the elderly. The research applies a counterfactual experimental approach (RCT) to evaluate the impact of APA on the psycho-physical conditions of over-64 attendees. In addition, the project intends to apply a new organizational model for APA dissemination among population.

The aim of our research is to shed some light on the issue related to the effect, negative or positive, of recreational night activities on residential property prices, by examining data collected on property purchases. We started with Turin data and we intend now to make some comparisons with the situation in Milan, by using an original highly detailed housing transactions dataset concerning Milan and Turin, covering the period from 2017 to 2018. Two conflicting views are present. According to the first the adverse environment for an apartment located in a "movida" district will result in a lower market value as compared to an apartment with similar characteristics, except for recreational noise. This occurs because potential buyers reduce their demand, as they discount present value of the costs of annoyance, loss of tranquility, and possible health effects. On the contrary, some claim that the price per square metre of properties has increased after "movida" developed, at least in certain districts, which were previously dilapidated and where nighttime economy can be seen as a means to restart an area. The two statements are not necessarily contradictory because we face a fragmented situation where two neighbors may report very distant night experiences, according, for instance, to the location of bedrooms. Specifically, we address the following two main research questions: 1. Do housing market responses to the noise pollution from recreational activities evidenced in previous studies from urban rail or traffic noise? 2. What are the underlying mechanisms that drive heterogeneity in housing market responses? Answering these research questions can help reflecting on appropriate interventions that policy makers could specifically implement in movida areas. In this regard, reliable results are quite hard to obtain, implying different methodological challenges. This proposal will discuss critical issues concerning data collection, measurement indicators, econometric techniques.

In the last years, social dynamics of gender equality are increasingly analyzed across many fields. In this context, the present work focuses on gender dynamics in politics, analyzing the effect of the Italian electoral law n. 215/2012 on the active participation of women in municipal elections. This law introduces "gender balance rules" aimed at fostering female active participation in the political arena and fighting the phenomenon of minor representation, and sometimes the exclusion, of women from Italian political competition at all administrative levels. In particular, the law introduces two mechanisms in medium and large (>5000 inhabitants) municipalities: a gender quota in electoral lists, guaranteeing that no gender counts more than 2/3, and the double gender preference, allowing electors to express two preferences if the candidates have different sex. The availability of panel microdata on candidates in Italian municipalities for the time span 2008-2016, including the implementation of the electoral reform, allows evaluating its effect in contrasting the exclusion/minor representation phenomenon, getting rid of the endogeneity bias typical of gender studies. Combining spatial, economic and social characteristics of municipalities with electoral data on candidates allows an econometric evaluation of factors affecting the female probability of candidacy. This work proposes an empirical investigation of the main determinants of female participation at the local level. In particular, the Correlated Random Effect panel data framework is applied, which allows estimating both between (cross-section) and within (time-series) effects with no unreliable orthogonality condition imposed between the regressors and the individual unobservable effects. Estimation results are in accordance with main findings in the literature. In particular, female participation declines when average family size increases, implying that higher involvement in domestic activities generally reduces women's propensity to political involvement (Schlozman, Burns and Verba 1994; Sayer 2005; Teorell, Torcal and Montero 2007; Morales 2009; Sartori, Tuorto and Ghigi 2017). The negative effect of urbanization degree suggests that women are more involved in small-scale activities (Stolle, Hooghe and Micheletti, 2005), while the positive effect of female activity rate suggests that women with higher social capital are more likely to participate in the political arena (Chibber 2002; Lowndes 2004). Moreover, CRE unobservable effects show different geographical paths (North/South), probably representing the unexplained cultural component (Putnam 1993; La Valle 2006; Almond and Verba 2015). This study provides very relevant considerations for policy-makers to align disparity between men and women regarding the access to politics. Moreover, results suggest the most suitable instruments to encourage women empowerment.

The general objective of the paper is to present the results of an evaluation of the effects produced by the regulatory measures introduced in recent years for the purposes of gender rebalancing in the elective offices. Women still encounter huge difficulties in being included in political decision-making. Even when they have the chance of participating to political competition as candidates, this is not a guarantee that they are elected and assigned to important political positions. Many countries have introduced rules and mechanisms to accelerate the rebalancing process. The general feeling is that their effectiveness may vary a lot, because they need to be well designed and effectively implemented to achieve good results, so asking an important evaluation question. Different types of mechanisms may be designed to ensure gender balance in politics. The main options adopted are: Gender shares in the lists of candidates; Double/triple gender preference; Alternate list. The three mechanisms can be paired, and their effectiveness depends also on their application with different voting regulation. We start from a statistical recognition of gender shares among candidates and elected representatives for all institutions in Italy. The impact evaluation is limited to the case of municipalities. In the other cases, the lack of a credible counterfactual forces us to limit to statistical analysis of observed change. In the depicted situation, the voting regulation for the administrative elections is a perfect context where to evaluate the effectiveness of gender rebalancing mechanisms. The paper presents the results of an evaluation based on RDD approach around the two thresholds present in the law (5.000 and 15.000 inhabitants). Moreover, the determinants of the impact are analysed, based on variables that affect women participation in electoral competition.

The general objective of the presentation is to show the results of an evaluation of the effects produced by the regulatory measures introduced in recent years for the purposes of gender rebalancing in the elective offices. Women still encounter huge difficulties in being included in political decision-making. Even when they have the chance of participating to political competition as candidates, this is not a guarantee that they are elected and assigned to important political positions. Many countries have introduced rules and mechanisms to accelerate the rebalancing process. The general feeling is that their effectiveness may vary a lot, because they need to be well designed and effectively implemented to achieve good results, so asking an important evaluation question. Different types of mechanisms may be designed to ensure gender balance in politics. The main options adopted are: Gender shares in the lists of candidates; Double/triple gender preference; Alternate list. The three mechanisms can be paired, and their effectiveness depends also on their application with different voting regulation. We start from a statistical recognition of gender shares among candidates and elected representatives for all institutions in Italy. The impact evaluation is limited to the case of municipalities. In the other cases, the lack of a credible counterfactual forces us to limit to statistical analysis of observed change. In the depicted situation, the voting regulation for the administrative elections is a perfect context where to evaluate the effectiveness of gender rebalancing mechanisms. The paper presents the results of an evaluation based on RDD approach around the two thresholds present in the law (5.000 and 15.000 inhabitants). Moreover, the determinants of the impact are analysed, based on variables that affect women participation in electoral competition.

The European Agency for Health and Safety at Work (2013) underlines that the development and implementation of OSH interventions, including policies, programs and their effects, are not evaluated by means of rigorous and scientific evidence-based research, denoting a general lack of quality in OSH intervention. In this panorama, the Italian case is particularly interesting. In 2008, a system of economic incentives has been introduced (d.lgs. 81/2008, art. 11), which assigns to various public entities the provision of grants addressed to small, medium and micro enterprises (SMEs) that realize investment projects in the field of health and safety at work. The most important intervention, in terms of both the number of beneficiaries and the provided amounts, has been realized by Inail. Since 2010, Inail has financed OSH projects for about 2 billion euros, which go under the name of "ISI calls". Up to now, the evaluation analyses performed by Inail on the ISI calls mainly concerned implementation processes and performance monitoring, reporting, and accounting. Recently, the need for an ex-post evaluation of the effects emerged, in order to improve the policy effectiveness. Therefore, Inail intends to plan a research aimed at identifying the appropriate models to assess the impact of the incentives and to highlight their strengths and criticalities as an economic support to SMEs. This paper overviewes the main theoretical and methodological aspects in the counterfactual evaluation of OSH policies. This overview is fundamental because the topic is not sufficiently addressed by both national and international literature, while studies on this topic are not so widespread. In particular, we reflect on: the possible evaluation questions that emerge when studying the impacts of OSH policies and their implications; the most appropriate evaluation designs that could answer the evaluation questions; and the consequent methodological issues (e.g., internal and external validity, feasibility of an evaluation based on administrative data, etc.).

I valori sociali del calcio. Un'esperienza al femminile

Our contribution declines the concept of resilience within the educating community; in particular, through the project "Oltre I Muri" the educating community has been able to change the educational environment of disadvantaged young people, in order to spur them and stimulate their learning through unusual locations and educational approaches. We present a work on the evaluation of a pilot program addressed to foreign adolescents with low language skills and high dropout risk, in junior high school. The intervention - developed by CNR-IRCrES and Piazza dei Mestieri (a private training centre in Turin) jointly with junior high schools - aims at filling their gaps both in general subjects knowledge and in soft skills. In order to facilitate the process of re-motivation and to favour the attachment to the school environment, "Oltre I Muri" propose the experimentation of alternating school-professional training activities. The swing of activities allows to experiment a different way of learning based on inductive pedagogic methods, professionally-oriented teaching, and individual coaching. In particular, the students involved in the project have the chance to move (for 290-hour) in professional training courses, instead of going to school and they can experience the basic subjects learning (Italian, math and English) through ateliers practice. The project was conceived in synergy among educators, trainers and teachers, in order to face successfully a transversal problem, which concerns both the scholastic and the social integration of young people. The pilot project has been evaluated through experimental counterfactual approach, we constructed a grid of profiling variables, that are monitored, for students belonging both to treated and control groups. The aim was to assess social and behavioural skills, alongside other variables concerning school performance. Previous experimental evaluations of similar programs (see Kautz et al., 2014) provide ambiguous results: depending on program features such as length of the treatment, role and pervasiveness of training, tutors, mentors, families' and peers' influence, long-term analyses showed either positive (Durlak et al., 2011) or negative (Rodrigues-Planas, 2012) effects on some outcome variables such as behavioural attitudes, soft skills, educational attainment, future wages and other labour market outcomes. Concerning our results, "Oltre I Muri" proved effective in contrasting early school leaving. In particular, 2 out of 10 untreated students dropped out during the pilot, while all the 11 treated students continued to attend regularly. This can be interpreted as a 20% increase in the attendance rate, which can be attributed to the project with a confidence level of the 80%, i.e. a value that is acceptable in a very small sample. When we discussed, for validation, the results of the evaluation with the teachers, they observed that there was great variation across the students in learning progress made, but it clearly emerged a strong impact of the project on students' motivation.

In the last years, social dynamics of gender equality are increasingly analyzed across many fields. In this context, the present work focuses on gender dynamics in politics, analyzing the effect of the Italian electoral law n. 215/2012 on the active participation of women in municipal elections. This law introduces "gender balance rules" aimed at fostering female active participation in the political arena and fighting the phenomenon of minor representation, and sometimes the exclusion, of women from Italian political competition at all administrative levels. In particular, the law introduces two mechanisms in medium and large (>5000 inhabitants) municipalities: a gender quota in electoral lists, guaranteeing that no gender counts more than 2/3, and the double gender preference, allowing electors to express two preferences if the candidates have different sex. The availability of panel microdata on candidates in Italian municipalities for the time span 2008-2016, including the implementation of the electoral reform, allows evaluating its effect in contrasting the exclusion/minor representation phenomenon, getting rid of the endogeneity bias typical of gender studies. Combining spatial, economic and social characteristics of municipalities with electoral data on candidates allows an econometric evaluation of factors affecting the female probability of candidacy. This work proposes an empirical investigation of the main determinants of female participation at the local level. In particular, the Correlated Random Effect panel data framework is applied, which allows estimating both between (cross-section) and within (time-series) effects with no unreliable orthogonality condition imposed between the regressors and the individual unobservable effects. Estimation results are in accordance with main findings in the literature. In particular, female participation declines when average family size increases, implying that higher involvement in domestic activities generally reduces women's propensity to political involvement (Schlozman, Burns and Verba 1994; Sayer 2005; Teorell, Torcal and Montero 2007; Morales 2009; Sartori, Tuorto and Ghigi 2017). The negative effect of urbanization degree suggests that women are more involved in small-scale activities (Stolle, Hooghe and Micheletti, 2005), while the positive effect of female activity rate suggests that women with higher social capital are more likely to participate in the political arena (Chibber 2002; Lowndes 2004). Moreover, CRE unobservable effects show different geographical paths (North/South), probably representing the unexplained cultural component (Putnam 1993; La Valle 2006; Almond and Verba 2015). This study provides very relevant considerations for policy-makers to align disparity between men and women regarding the access to politics. Moreover, results suggest the most suitable instruments to encourage women empowerment.

A long tradition of electoral studies focuses on the effects of the social context on political participation (Marsh, 2002; Huckfeldt and Sprague, 1993). At the same time, an equally fertile line of research applies to the determination of the main causes of the gap of women in political representation. This article is located at the crossroads of these two fields of research. Its purpose is to illustrate how context variables can determine female candidate quota. In order to investigate the relationship between the quota of female candidatures and a plurality of social and economic variables related to context, a specification of the Correlated Random Effect (CRE) model has been applied to a panel. Indeed, this model allows to consider together time variant and time invariant variables. Data refer to municipal elections in Italy from 2009 to 2016. This period is particularly interesting since in 2012 an electoral reform became law that provides some gender rebalancing mechanisms in municipal elections.

Le valutazioni di Placement condotte nelle annualità 2007-2013 hanno permesso di valutare l'impatto netto delle politiche formative della Regione Piemonte attraverso un disegno quasi sperimentale, caratterizzato da un campione di trattati ed uno di controllo, con caratteristiche molto simili a quelle dei formati. Per via delle specifiche debolezze dell'utenza della formazione professionale, l'identificazione di un adeguato gruppo controfattuale è risultata complessa. Si è quindi scelto di integrare l'analisi di impatto, sperimentando una nuova metodologia per studiare il fenomeno in oggetto con un approccio multidimensionale: la modellistica ad equazioni strutturali (Structural Equation Modelling - SEM, Tenenhaus et al., 2005). Essa è capace di offrire descrizioni affidabili e sistematiche di variabili latenti multidimensionali. Il fenomeno indagato - nel nostro caso l'impatto delle condizioni individuali e delle politiche - viene espresso attraverso insiemi di indicatori compositi (CI) nei tre livelli osservati di input, output e outcome. In questo capitolo descriveremo l'applicazione sperimentale della metodologia SEM per valutare la formazione iniziale attraverso l'impiego dei dati primari derivanti dalla survey condotta su 622 giovani studenti, che hanno completato con successo un percorso di Istruzione e Formazione Professionale (IeFP) in Regione. L'intento è quello di valutare l'impatto della Formazione Professionale sulla valorizzazione del capitale umano dei formati e sulla loro occupabilità. La scelta di avviare questa sperimentazione metodologica con i percorsi dedicati ai giovani in obbligo d'istruzione è legata al fatto che in tale ambito risulta impossibile realizzare una valutazione di efficacia basata su tecniche controfattuali. Infatti, poiché i giovani in età di obbligo d'istruzione devono per legge essere inclusi in un percorso di istruzione, risulta impossibile costruire un campione di controllo composto da non trattati. L'applicazione del metodo SEM potrà contribuire a colmare tale lacuna evidenziando l'incremento di capitale umano determinato dalla politica formativa.

Il contributo offre una panoramica sullo sport al femminile, con particolare riferimento al calcio, in ambito italiano ed europeo

il contributo analizza lo stato dell'apprendistato in alta formazione e ricerca in regione piemonte

Il volume descrive e valuta un progetto pilota per l'integrazione di giovani migranti nel sistema scolastico italiano

This paper presents the experimental evaluation of a pilot program for the educational inclusion of foreign adolescents with low language skills and high dropout risk in junior high school. The intervention aims at filling migrant students' gaps in both general subject knowledge and character skills. The pilot is jointly developed by a private VET (Vocational Education and Training) center for adolescents in Turin, Italy, and some local junior high schools. During the pilot, treated students attend 290-hour classes at the VET center. VET classes aim at restoring students' interest in education by professionally-oriented teaching, inductive innovative pedagogical methods, and individual mentorship. The pilot is evaluated through experimental counterfactual design. In the recent past, a similar preliminary project had positive results, but its evaluation was based on qualitative evidence and on teachers' subjective assessment. Now, a grid of outcome variables is proposed to monitor students in the treated and control groups regarding their educational inclusion and scholastic achievement. The aim is to assess social and behavioral skills, alongside school performance. Previous experimental evaluations of similar programs (see Kautz et al., 2014 for a survey) provide ambiguous results: depending on program features such as length of the treatment, role and pervasiveness of training, tutors, mentors, families' and peers' influence, long-term analyses showed either positive (Durlak et al., 2011; Tierney et al., 1995; Orr et al., 1994) or negative (Rodrigues-Planas, 2012) effects on some outcome variables such as behavioral attitudes, character skills, educational attainment, future wages and other labor market outcomes. For this reason, the project adopts a randomized experimental design, so as to get sound evidence on the effectiveness of the implemented activities.

Dal 2010 la Regione Piemonte produce analisi volte a valutare gli effetti della formazione professionale sull'occupabilità delle persone. Il presente Rapporto fornisce, come in passato, informazioni sugli esiti e sugli effetti della Formazione Professionale finanziata dalle risorse comunitarie, a distanze diverse dalla fine dei corsi. In particolare in questa edizione ci occupiamo, mediante innovazioni metodologiche, degli esiti occupazionali delle persone qualificate e specializzate nel 2015.

Il libro espone i risultati della 4a indagine di placement effettuata per valutare gli esiti e gli impatti della formazione professionale in Regione Piemonte. Oltre ai consueti capitoli che analizzano gli impatti lordi e netti, il rapporto contiene degli approfondimenti tematici su: - la transizione formazione-lavoro - un'analisi retrospettiva delle politiche formative in Piemonte negli anni 2010-2013 - una sperimentazione dell'impiego dell'approccio SEM (structural equation modelling) alla valutazione della formazione professionale

The volume describes and evaluates a pilot project aimed at the integration of young migrants, in the Italian school system

Il contributo offre una panoramica sullo sport femminile in Italia, con particolare attenzione al calcio

The widespread adoption of highly interactive social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms allows users to communicate moods and opinions to their social network. Those platforms represent an unprecedented source of information about human habits and socio-economic interactions. Several new studies have started to exploit the potential of these big data as fingerprints of economic and social interactions. The present analysis aims at exploring the informative power of indicators derived from social media activity, with the aim to trace some preliminary guidelines to investigate the eventual correspondence between social media indices and available labour market indicators at a territorial level. The study is based on a large data set of about four million Italian-language tweets collected from October 2014 to December 2015, filtered by a set of specific keywords related to the labour market. With techniques from machine learning and user's geolocalization, we were able to subset the tweets on specific topics in all Italian provinces. The corpus of tweets is then analysed with linguistic tools and hierarchical clustering analysis. A comparison with traditional economic indicators suggests a strong need for further cleaning procedures, which are then developed in detail. As data from social networks are easy to obtain, this represents a very first attempt to evaluate their informative power in the Italian context, which is of potentially high importance in economic and social research.

In evaluating a policy, it is fundamental to represent its multiple dimensions and the targets it affects. Indeed, the impact of a policy generally involves a combination of socio-economic aspects that are difficult to represent. In this study, regional training policies are addressed, which are aimed at closing the huge gaps in employability and social inclusion of Italian trainees. Previous counterfactual estimates of the net impact of regional training policies reveal the need to observe and take into account the manifold aspects of trainees' weaknesses. In fact, the target population consists of very disadvantaged individuals, who tend to experience difficult situations in the labour market. To overcome this shortfall, the present paper proposes Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) that considers the impact of trainees' socio-economic conditions on the policy outcome itself. In particular, the ex ante human capital (HC) is estimated from the educational, social and individual backgrounds. Next, the labour and training policies augment the individual HC, affecting labour market outcomes jointly with individual job-search behaviour. All these phenomena are expressed by a wide set of manifest variables and synthesised by composite indicators calculated with Partial Least Squares SEM (SEM-PLS). The construction of the SEM is appraised and applied to the case of trainees in compulsory education.

A vine decline of kiwifruit (Actinidia deliciosa, A. chinensis) was observed in 2012 and 2014 in about 600 hectares in the Verona province (Northern Italy). During the first two years, a progressive vine decline took place during summers with high temperatures (over 35C°) requiring copious furrow irrigation, and with mild temperatures and abundant rainfall during winter and spring that caused long periods of soil waterlogging. The diseased plants died after a gradual blight of the leaves. Rotting of the roots intermediate in diameter and of the distal rootlets were associated with all cases of decline Phytophthora and Pythium species were isolated from the decayed roots, were plate purified and identified by sequence analysis of the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region of the rDNA amplified with specific primers. Pathogenicity of the Phytophthora isolates was verified with experimental inoculations of kiwifruit plantlets: typical symptoms of the decline in the leaves were caused by isolates of Phytophthora cryptogea. This is the first report of Phytophthora and Pythium presence in plants with root rot and vine decline of kiwifruit in Northern Italy associated to anomalous climate conditions.

La formazione professionale (FP) è una politica attiva del lavoro che mira ad accrescere il capitale umano e l'occupabilità, ma prende in carico anche numerose istanze legate al disagio, scolastico, lavorativo e sociale. Perciò, una buona calibrazione della FP sul bisogno individuale è fondamentale. Purtroppo, la personalizzazione dei percorsi viene raramente realizzata, per molteplici difficoltà nell'implementazione. Tale personalizzazione è particolarmente rilevante nella FP iniziale, che accoglie molti giovani con un pesante bagaglio di condizioni e percorsi difficili. Questo contributo intende concentrarsi sul tema della profilazione di tali utenti, anche in vista di un'associazione della profilazione a meccanismi di remunerazione delle agenzie formative basati sulla premialità. Per non introdurre distorsioni, è infatti necessario misurare correttamente il livello in ingresso dei trattati. Però, l'eventuale svantaggio risulta molto difficile da identificare, essendo una caratteristica multidimensionale e latente. Laddove la profilazione sconfini nelle problematiche individuali, l'analista dovrà affrontare quindi due problemi: l'acquisizione di informazioni rilevanti ed attendibili e l'elaborazione di indicatori sintetici atti a rappresentare un problema complesso. Perciò, questo articolo si soffermerà anche sui percorsi di indagine per acquisire informazioni adeguate e affidabili per il calcolo degli indicatori. Per descrivere la situazione in ingresso, si proporrà l'utilizzo di modelli ad equazioni strutturali (SEM), atti a identificare fenomeni multidimensionali e latenti attraverso indicatori compositi, legati a diversi indicatori elementari che ne rappresentano il sintomo esterno osservabile, e collegati ad altri indicatori compositi, in una visione sistemica. Nel contesto della formazione iniziale, tale impianto modellistico consente di descrivere in modo completo il profilo in ingresso degli utenti e di osservare in modo sistemico quali servizi e interventi abbiano maggiore impatto sulle variabili obiettivo. L'articolo discute inoltre alcune esperienze di rilevazione della condizione in ingresso, presentando i risultati ottenuti con SEM e discutendo vantaggi e difetti di tale approccio statistico nel campo della profilazione dell'utenza.

In evaluating a policy, it is fundamental to represent its multiple dimensions and the targets it affects. Indeed, the impact of a policy generally involves a combination of socio-economic aspects that are difficult to represent. In this study, regional training policies are addressed, which are aimed at recovering the huge gaps in employability and social inclusion of weak Italian trainees. Previous counterfactual estimates of the net impact of regional training policies show the mess to observe and take into account the manifold aspects of trainees' weakness. In fact, the target population consists of very disadvantaged individuals, who experience hard situations in the labour market. To overcome this shortfall, the present paper proposes a Structural Equation Model, that considers the impact of trainees' socio-economic conditions on the policy outcome itself. In particular, the ex ante human capital is estimated from educational, social and individual backgrounds. Then, labour and training policies augment the individual human capital, affecting labour market outcomes jointly with individual job search behaviour. All these phenomena are expressed by a wide set of manifest variables and synthesised by composite indicators calculated with Partial Least Squares SEM. The makings of SEM are appraised, applied to the case of trainees in compulsory education.

The quality and reliability of net impact evaluation is strongly affected by the choice of the counterfactual group. In the case of randomized sample selection (ex-ante experimental attribution to the treated and control groups) the differences between the two groups are likely to be mainly due to the treatment. On the other hand, when applying quasi-experimental methods (ex-post selection of a control group among the non-treated units) it is very difficult to assess whether the observed differences derive from the treatment itself or rather from the selection method. Different non-experimental control groups face different sources of selection bias (Heckman, Lalonde, and Smith, 1999), but it is a priori not clear what choice would minimize it. Hence, in counterfactual analysis the main source of problems is linked to selection bias, which occurs whenever the decision on the treatment is not independent from observable and non-observable individual characteristics. A second source of problems concerns the availability of information, since not-treated units are not included in monitoring data-bases. In this sense, the availability and integration of administrative data-bases from different sources may open new frontiers to quasi-experimental methods. Nevertheless, in this new perspective two problems arise. Firstly, the technical use of administrative data-bases, designed for accountability purposes different than evaluation analysis, so requiring a long pre-processing . The second one concerns the choice among different counterfactual groups, mainly unexplored. In fact, to our knowledge no study compares different solutions implemented on the same policy. Then, this paper investigates the differences in net impact assessment ascribable to the use of different counterfactual groups. The evaluation exercise is performed on Piedmont training policies. The placement effects of regional training policies will be estimated using both a control sample selected from drop-outs (no-shows), and a control group appropriately extracted from the lists of unemployed individuals. We will run the same model to estimate the impact of the treatment, controlling for individual characteristics and comparing the results, with particular attention to selection bias. Although only a comparison of the different techniques to the experimental benchmark could provide ultimate indications, some useful insights can be gained on the potential sources and directions of distortion due to different counterfactuals.

The aim of this paper is to propose a reflection on specific learnings, arising from a cyclic evaluation of the same intervention. The proposed topic is the study of Placement of Vocational Training in Piedmont Region (IT), held from 2011 to 2014. Through a diachronic reading of the four annual reports of the Placement, are presented three dimensions of analysis: financial dynamics, employment outcomes and net impacts. This contribute aims to discuss learnings in terms of method and policy, starting by the main results emerging from the analysis of the three dimensions listed above.