In this study, we leverage on Italy's size-contingent firing restrictions to identify the causal effect of employment protection legislation (EPL) on firm-provided training using a regression discontinuity design. Our analysis demonstrates that higher levels of EPL reduce incentives for firms to invest in workers' training. The number of trained workers...

This paper studies the impact of the first Italian Research Evaluation Exercise (VTR 2001-2003) on university undergraduate students' enrolment choices. A before-after estimator with differential treatment intensities is used to investigate whether subject-group higher education institutions (HEIs) that had a higher performance in the VTR also benefited from more student...

In this paper we highlight a new complementary channel to the business and social network effect à la Rauch (2001) through which immigrants generate increased export flows from the regions in which they settle to their countries of origin: they can become entrepreneurs. Using very small-scale (NUTS-3) administrative data on...

In December 2016, the Italian electorate voted for a referendum on crucial constitutional reform promoted by the governing party. The official aims of the reform were both to improve the country’s governability and stability and to simplify the institutional setup. Despite not strictly being a political vote, the referendum was...

This paper investigates whether or not research quality is significantly associated with a university's ability to attract students from other provinces in Italy. First university enrolments of students over the period 2003–2011 are regressed on several universities' research quality indicators computed from different bibliometric databases (ISI-Thompson, Scopus-Elsevier and Google Scholar)...

This paper examines the causal effects of family size and demographic structure on offspring's international migration. We use rich survey data from Mexico to estimate the impact of sibship size, birth order and sibling composition on teenagers' and young adults' migration outcomes. We find no empirical support for the hypothesis...

In this paper, we exploit pension reform-induced changes in retirement eligibility requirements to assess the role of grandparental child care availability in the employment of women who have children under 15. We focus on Italy for two reasons: first, it has low rates of female employment and little formal child...

War can have long-lasting effects on individual mental health through war trauma. In this paper, we explore the impact of constantly recalling painful episodes related to the 1992-1995 Bosnia and Herzegovina conflict on individual mental health in 2001 using the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression (CES-D) scale. Potential endogeneity and...

Previous research shows that, in tracked school systems, enrollment decisions are strongly associated with future outcomes both in education and on the labour market. Yet few studies explicitly investigate whether students (and their parents) have all the relevant information they need to make proper decisions. We address this issue by...

We use small Italian regions (i.e. provinces) to investigate the causal effect of foreign immigration on innovation during 2003-2008. Using instrumental variables estimation (based on immigrants' enclaves), we find that the overall stock of immigrants did not have any effect on innovation. However, decomposing the overall effect into the contributions...