This paper investigates the impact of Higher Vocational Education and Training (HVET) on local development in Italy, focusing on entrepreneurship and innovation. HVET institutions were introduced by law in 2008, under the form of public-private foundations, with a prominent role of private firms in both governance, course design, and implementation. We use province-level panel data from 2009 to 2023 and leverage variation across provinces and over time in the opening of HVET institutions to estimate causal effects with a staggered difference-in-differences approach. Results indicate a positive impact of HVET on firm birth rate, the share of new innovative firms, and the number of patents, although with heterogeneity across areas. We find significant innovation gains without an entry response in the North, entry gains without innovation effects in the Centre–South. We interpret these results in light of regional differences in market thickness and absorptive capacity. We finally explore the role of HVET networks and course quality as potential mechanisms.

Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) are vital for safeguarding and enhancing foreign investments, pivotal in Global Production Networks (GPNs). This study assesses the impact of BITs on GPNs driven by EU multinational enterprises, with a focus on regions hosting corporate headquarters due to their influence on the local economy. While considering the endogeneity of BITs and their diverse effects on GPN structures, our findings reveal a positive correlation between BITs and GPNs, notably stronger in less globally integrated regions. Additionally, the influence varies based on firms' network role (headquarters or subsidiaries) and the spatial distribution of headquarters. BITs stimulate GPNs in less internationalized regions but have minimal impact in headquarters-rich regions.

This article empirically investigates the effects of global shocks on EU-28 countries' patterns of specialisation by focusing on the global financial crisis of 2008. In particular, it addresses the following two research questions: Did the financial crisis change the patterns of specialisation of EU member states? Was the impact of the crisis homogenous across countries and manufacturing products? Answering these questions is important because changes in specialisation generate inequalities, given the shift of the demand from one factor to another. Using an unconditional quantile regression approach, this study demonstrates that the financial crisis had a positive effect which was larger on products in which countries were not specialised before the crisis. Some heterogeneity also emerged at both sectoral and geographical levels.

We study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and its side effects on the academic achievement of students in a large university located in a northern Italian region severely affected by the pandemic. Thanks to the richness of our data, we can investigate for the first time the role of two specific channels: the increase in study time due to the exceptionally strict confinement measures adopted and the availability of class recordings. We use administrative data on four cohorts of students merged with original survey data. We adopt a fixed-effect difference-in-differences approach, where we compare the outcomes of students from different enrolment cohorts observed in the same semester of their academic career before and after the COVID-19 outbreak. We find a generalized positive effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on students’ academic achievement in terms of both earned credits and GPA. We provide evidence that both increased study time and the availability of class recordings contributed to mediating this positive effect.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to use the two-way fixed effect (TWFE) methodology to estimate the impact of the reform, exploiting its staggered implementation across regions. The analysis is restricted to graduates from the short vocational track before and after the reform. Design/methodology/approach This paper studies the impact on the length of school-to-work transition of a reform that extended from two to three years the short vocational track in Italy in the early 2000s. Findings The study finds that the reform had a positive impact and reduced school-to-work transition by around five months (a 24% reduction). Moreover, the new short vocational track proved to be extremely effective for migrants and females, whose school-to-work transition was reduced by 1.4 years and 0.9 years, respectively. In implementing the new short vocational track, some regions adopted a quasi-market organization in which private training institutions competed with public schools. This model proved to be more effective in shortening school-to-work transitions, in particular for migrants. Originality/value This study makes an important contribution to the literature on the labor-market effect of vocational education by showing that lengthening the short vocational track, and changing the overall content of curricula, can speed up school-to-work transition.

The aim of this study is to provide an estimate of the social costs of gambling in Italy. In line with other research on social costs, the present study estimates the consequences of gambling harm on public finances, focusing on the estimated costs to treat high-risk gamblers, costs associated with productivity losses, costs of unemployment, personal and family costs, crime and legal costs. We used two different approaches to calculate these costs. The first approach, used for health care costs, consists of using the lump sum spent to prevent the harm caused to high-risk gamblers. The second approach involves estimating the number of high-risk gamblers causing the cost, which is then multiplied with the average unit cost per person. Our estimates of the annual social costs of gambling in Italy – more than EUR 2.3 billion – demonstrate a substantial economic burden to society. However, the costs are a substantial underestimate, as they are limited to those of a public nature and do not take into consideration those costs borne by moderate and low-risk gamblers, as well as affected others.

Abstract We analyze the causal effect of retirement on individual social relationships using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe. We find that retirement changes the composition of the individual’s social network, inducing a substitution between weak (friends or colleagues) and strong ties (family), along with an increase in the intensity of the surviving ties, and there is no effect on the network’s size. These changes in the social network’s composition are associated with a higher satisfaction and stronger relationships. Interestingly, females reduce the share of friends while males that of colleagues.

This paper explores the role that judicial efficiency may play as a determinant of inward FDI at sub-national level. Italy is an ideal case to deal with this still unexplored issue since the same law apply in all the national territory, but the degree of law enforcement varies considerably across different courts. We found that judicial efficiency affects positively FDI inflows. This result, though heterogeneous across different economic sectors, is robust to different specifications and sample selections. Our results have interesting policy implications, since they highlight the importance of non-targeted FDI policies as factors driving inward flows.

We study the effect of classroom rank on high school students' Big Five personality traits. We exploit idiosyncratic differences in the class distribution of earlier academic achievement. Such differences generate quasi-random variation in class rank for students with the same initial achievement. We find a positive and sizeable effect of rank on conscientiousness, but we find no effects on the other four personality traits. A thorough analysis of the mechanism suggests that the primary channels through which class rank improves conscientiousness are perceived ability and academic motivation.

This paper examines the effect of a high school student's relative position in the class achievement distribution on school violence. We identify this effect by exploiting idiosyncratic differences in the distribution of earlier academic achievement across classes. Such differences generate quasi-random variation in rank for students with the same initial achievement. We consider distinct types of school violence, namely, verbal, relational and physical violence. We find that rank negatively affects both the probability and frequency of perpetrating school violence for all the specific types of violence considered. The effect size is economically significant, especially in the case of physical violence. We find that rank is less or not effective in reducing physical violence for migrants and for students attending lower-quality schools and living in high-crime areas; this finding is consistent with the lower perceived opportunity cost associated with misbehavior among disadvantaged students in low-quality schools and located in violent local contexts.

In this letter, we study employer learning about worker ability during apprenticeship. We exploit an exogenous shock that increased the number of apprenticeship contracts in Italy, to analyse what type of workers were hired and which ones were trained more during the contract. We find that firms select workers according to their ability not upon recruiting them, but during the apprenticeships and the higher the revealed ability of the workers, the more training they receive.

This paper investigates the impact of Export Promotion Programs (EPPs) in Lombardy-one of the richest region in Italy and one of the four Motors of Europe-on the export performance of beneficiary firms. To assess the impact of the EPPs, we applied a fixed-effect differences-in-differences estimator with ex-ante matching. We shed light on why and how EPPs work by exploring in details what dimensions of export performance respond better to these programs, which support services are more related to export success and which firms benefit more. Our estimates suggest that assisted firms show higher export propensity and export intensity than non-assisted firms, with micro- and small-sized firms and already exporting firms benefiting the most. Last but not least, the effect of EPPs remains positive and significant even when the potential impact of other subsidies is accounted for. These results are useful for improving the design of EPPs.

The authors study the effect of corporate board gender quotas on firm performance in France, Italy, and Spain. The identification strategy exploits the exogenous variation in mandated gender quotas within country and over time and uses a counterfactual methodology. Using firm-level accounting data and a difference-in-difference estimator, the authors find that gender quotas had either a negative or an insignificant effect on firm performance in the countries considered with the exception of Italy, where they find a positive impact on productivity. The authors then focus on Italy. Using a novel data set containing detailed information on board members' characteristics, they offer possible explanations for the positive effect of gender quotas. The results provide an important contribution to the policy debate about the optimal design of legislation on corporate gender quotas.

We analyze the causal effect of retirement on the size, composition and intensity of social relationships using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe for 11 European countries. Our empirical strategy exploits the different retirement eligibility ages as instruments for the endogenous individuals’ retirement decisions and controls for time invariant individual characteristics. We show that retirement changes the composition of the individual’s social network, increasing the share of family members, and decreasing the share of colleagues and friends, while there is no effect on the network’s absolute size. Changes in the social network’s composition are associated with a higher overall satisfaction and more intense relationships. We argue that retirement induces a substitution between weak (friends or colleagues) and strong ties (family), along with an increase in the intensity of the surviving ties. Interestingly this substitution has a gender dimension: females mainly reduce the share of friends while males that of colleagues.

We study the effect of classroom rank on high-school students’ bullying and victimization. We exploit idiosyncratic differences in the class distribution of earlier academic achievement within curricula, schools and grades. Such differences generate quasi-random variation in rank for students with the same initial achievement. We find a negative effect of rank on bullying which is larger for boys, students from medium-high background, migrants and students in academic curricula. On average we find no effect of rank on victimization, although higher ranked girls and students in academic curriculum are less likely to be vicimized, while boys and students from professional curriculum are more at risk of victimization if they rank high. We provide evidence that subjective wellbeing and self-confidence contribute to channel the negative effect of rank on bullying.

This article provides a detailed and robust estimate of the impact of three different digital technologies (interactive whiteboards, wireless connections, and mobile devices) on Italian language and mathematics performance in lower secondary schools in Italy. Our analysis of longitudinal data from 2010 to 2014 shows that no significant effects emerge at a national level from increased stocks of any of the three technologies, confirming the existing literature. However, when controlling for geographical area, we show that all three technologies had a positive effect on mathematics results in the north of Italy, with a detrimental effect in the south. We find that the positive effect in the north was driven by low‐attaining schools, while the negative impact in the south was driven by higher attaining schools. No effects were found on Italian language performance, except for a slightly positive impact in the lowest‐achieving schools in all geographical areas. The significance of these results is discussed with regards to future public intervention and research in this field.