The trend over time of the gender wage gap in Italy

We analyse gender wage gaps in Italy in the mid-1990s and in the mid-2000s. In this period, important labour market developments took place and they could have had a gender asymmetric impact on wages. We identify the time trends of different components of the gender wage gap across all the wage distribution. Although the unconditional gender wage gap remained roughly constant over time, we find that the component of the gap due to different rewards of similar characteristics deteriorated women’s relative wage. We show that especially women at the centre-top of the wage distribution swam against the tide: while the trend in female qualifications slightly reduced the gender wage gap, the gender-relative trends in the wage structure significantly increased it.     

Export and import market-specific characteristics

Using a rich firm-level dataset on the Italian manufacturing industry, this paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the role that firms and market characteristics play in shaping firms’ trade activities. We enhance the previous analyses by considering firms’ engagement in international transactions, by focusing on either exports or imports. We show that the determinants of a firm’s export participation and value across countries also drive import behavior. Our research is consistent with the presence of country-specific sunk costs and with a qualitatively similar role of gravity forces and other country attributes on both sides of trading activities. Our evidence, however, militates in favor of a framework where variations in market characteristics have a larger impact on imports than exports.     

European Technological Sovereignty: An Emerging Framework for Policy Strategy

Intereconomics - The COVID-19 crisis has revealed the deep technological and production dependencies of the EU on third countries in sectors deemed as particularly strategic and has thus fuelled...     

Retirement and Healthy Eating

This paper investigates the effect of retirement on healthy eating using data drawn from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). We estimate the causal effect of retiring from work on daily fruit or vegetable consumption by exploiting policy changes in eligibility rules for early and statutory retirement. Our results show that changes in eating behaviour upon retirement are gender-specific: retirement induces men to reduce healthy eating; it has no effect on women. We further show that, for men, retirement increases the probability of becoming obese.     

Materiality in integrated and sustainability reporting: A paradigm shift?

This paper investigates the implementation of integrated reporting (IR) by Generali, one of the most important listed companies in Italy. The research questions we aim at answering are the following: Is the IR approach to materiality inherently different from the sustainability reporting (SR) approach? Does IR lead to the identification of different material topics than does SR? On the one hand, institutional theory suggests that IR and SR material topics are going to be significantly different because IR is mainly driven by a market logic, whereas SR is inspired by a stakeholder logic. On the other hand, organizational change theory predicts there will be some resistance to change by the organization, therefore leading to IR and SR topics being similar. In order to answer our research questions, we implement two empirical analyses. First, we propose and develop an innovative methodological approach on the basis of content analysis, which allows measuring the materiality of different issues under the IR approach. Second, we rely on evidence obtained through interviews, which suggests that IR and SR approaches to materiality are inherently different.     

Personality and cognitive skills in network of friends,for multi-ethnic schools

In a multi-ethnic society, friendship among children might be expected to be overwhelmingly shaped by ethnicity and cultural heritage. Using an original panel data-set of classmate networks in multi-ethnic primary schools near Florence, Italy, ($N=396$ children in 2nd and 5th grade), we show instead that cognitive skills and personality traits matter as much as ethnicity in shaping friendships, thus playing the role of elective affinities. We test whether friends affect a child’s personality more than the other way round: to do this, we estimate peer effects. We only find non-significant effect of peers on math grades and a measure of intelligence (KBIT). For personality traits, peer effects are significant only for Extraversion. These findings are crucial for design of immigration policies: rather than emphasizing differences among ethnic groups, a farsighted policy could try to point these elective affinities among individuals.     

Customers’ judgments and misjudgments of corporate responsibility communication: A cross‐country investigation of the effects on confidence and trust within the banking sector

Customers’ judgment of corporate responsibility (CR) communication and the effect on confidence and trust as interlinked paradigms are intriguing areas of investigation from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. This research aims to clarify the nature of effective CR communication toward customers by identifying situations of over‐ and undercommunication of CR that might cause misjudgments and therefore lower the level of confidence among customers. The study also provides insights to better explain the link between confidence and trust related to customers’ perceptions of CR communication and compares different judgments and misjudgments regarding the banking industries in Italy and the United Kingdom. The study adopts real and fictitious bank case studies to conduct focus groups investigations of 160 millennial customers’ perceptions of CR communication and how it affects their level of confidence. The findings highlight the role of trust in making independent judgments on CR communications. Some similarities and slight differences in the impact of CR communication on confidence emerge between the countries and greatly depend on the customers’ level of trust in real banks and the influence of the industry effect characterizing the banking sector. This study provides fertile ground for future research into the implementation of a more effective and balanced CR communication strategy to increase customers’ confidence and into the understanding of which communication drivers, apparently independent of CR, affect trust in the long term.     

Economies with informational asymmetries and limited vetoer coalitions

With reference to a model of coalitional economies with asymmetric information, we consider different possible restrictions on the set of blocking coalitions. We provide suitable price systems decentralizing allocations in the corresponding enlarged core.     

Using regression tree ensembles to model interaction effects: a graphical approach

Multiplicative interaction terms are widely used in economics to identify heterogeneous effects and to tailor policy recommendations. The execution of these models is often flawed due to specification and interpretation errors. This article introduces regression trees and regression tree ensembles to model and visualize interaction effects. Tree-based methods include interactions by construction and in a nonlinear manner. Visualizing nonlinear interaction effects in a way that can be easily read overcomes common interpretation errors. We apply the proposed approach to two different datasets to illustrate its usefulness.