IZA 劳动经济学研究所

We study how managerial practices of school principals affect student performance and aspirations. We link administrative data on secondary Italian students to the management scores of their school principals in 2011 and 2015 based on the World Management Survey methodology. The frequent turnover of school principals over this period allows us to causally interpret school-fixed-effect estimates. We find that management quality positively and substantially impacts standardized math and language tests and student desire to attend college. The comparison to pooled-OLS suggests that fixed effects correct for the downward bias arising from selection of better school principals into more difficult schools.

A vast literature studies the behavioral impacts of health care reforms, often coming to controversial conclusions. Here we examine the time allocation effects of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obama Care, focusing on two pillars, namely Medicaid expansion, which increased access to public health insurance, and the Tax Credit Premium, subsidizing the purchase of private health insurance. Using 2012–2015 daily diary data from the American Time Use Survey, we take a difference-in-difference-in-differences approach, which exploits the cross-state variation in the timing of ACA implementation, together with differences in income eligibility thresholds, to identify the effects at stake. Considering a sample of childless adults aged 27–64, a group not eligible for public health insurance before ACA, we find that the Medicaid expansion reduced their labor supply by over an hour per day, increasing part-time work, while the Premium Tax Credit is associated with a slight increase in employment levels. The implications for other uses of time are also analyzed.

Advances in artificial intelligence and data analytics have notably expanded employers’ monitoring and surveillance capabilities, facilitating the accurate observability of work effort. There is an ongoing debate among academics and policymakers about the productivity and broader welfare implications of digital monitoring (DM) technologies. In this context, many countries confer information, consultation and codetermination rights to employee representation (ER) bodies on matters related to the workplace governance of these technologies. Using a cross-sectional sample of more than 21000 European establishments, we document a positive association between ER and the utilization of DM technologies. We also find a positive effect of ER on DM utilization in the context of a local-randomization regression discontinuity analysis that exploits size-contingent policy rules governing the operation of ER bodies in Europe. Finally, in an exploratory analysis, we find a positive association between DM and process innovations, particularly in establishments where ER bodies are present and a large fraction of workers perform jobs that require finding solutions to unfamiliar problems. We interpret these findings through the lens of a labor discipline model in which the presence of ER bodies affect employer's decision to invest in DM technologies.

Conscription remains a prevalent method of military recruitment in many developing countries, yet its broader consequences are underresearched in these contexts. This study leverages a unique exemption rule in Iran-where sole sons were spared from conscription once their fathers reached age 59-to estimate the causal effect of conscription on educational decisions. Using a regression discontinuity design, it shows that sole sons just below the 59 cutoff attended college at rates 14 percentage points (24%) higher than their counterparts, effectively postponing conscription until their fathers reached 59. Robustness checks confirm that the exemption law drives these results. Because admission to college is both competitive and expensive-households typically spent 1.5 times per capita gross domestic product in a single year to improve their children's chances-sole sons incur substantial burdens to avoid conscription. These findings shed new light on the unintended effects of conscription policies.

We aim to identify winners and losers of a sudden inflow of low-skilled immigrants using a general equilibrium search and matching model in which employees, either native or nonnative, are heterogeneous with respect to their skill level and produce different types of goods. We estimate the short-term impact of this shock for Italy in the period 2008-2017 to be sizeable and highly asymmetric. In 2017, the real wages of low-skilled and high-skilled employees were 8% lower and 4% higher, respectively, compared to a counter-factual scenario with no non-natives. Similarly, employers working in the low-skilled market experienced a drop in profits of comparable magnitude, while the opposite happened to employers operating in the high-skilled market. Finally, the presence of non-natives led to a 10% increase in GDP and to an increment of approximately 70 billions € in Government revenues and 18 billions € in social security contributions. We argue that these results help rationalise the recent surge of anti-immigrant sentiments among the low-income segment of the Italian population.