Factors determining the degree of gender equality within the European Union

Quality & Quantity - This paper aims to identify the major determinants of the structural differences in gender equality for EU countries, using tools from partial order theory on a system of 6...     

Modelling the switch from hail insurance to antihail nets

We analyse the impact of the antihail net promotion on the actuarial soundness of the hail insurance market. Specifically, we present a simple model showing that, in the presence of an imperfect insurance market, incentives for antihail nets could cause low-risk farmers to exit the insurance market more likely than high-risk ones. This induces a typical adverse selection problem. The theoretical model predictions are corroborated by an empirical investigation. Based on a fixed-effect conditional logit regression, we show that a higher per-hectare output value and a location strongly affected by hail both increase the chance that a plot is hedged through antihail nets.     

Telework quality and employee well-being: Lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) forced organisations to implement intensive telework for many of their workers overnight. This scenario was completely new, and the emergency caused by COVID-19 created the possibility of experimenting with new ways of working with an unknown impact on employee well-being. Drawing on previous literature, we defined a model of telework quality consisting of the following four core domains: agile offices within organisations, functional remote workstations, flex-time and engaging management. We identified two high-quality and low-quality telework profiles using latent profile analysis on a data sample of 2295 insurance and financial sector employees. Demographic, occupational and procedural characteristics were associated with the probability of being in the positive or negative profiles. Our results showed that employees' emotional exhaustion and work engagement levels were related to telework quality. This study suggests that organisations need to consider the quality of telework to effectively adopt new ways of working that foster employee well-being.     

Introduction to the Milestones series

Decisions in Economics and Finance - This piece in the Milestones series is dedicated to the paper coauthored by David Gale and Lloyd Shapley and published in 1962 under the title “College...     

Ethical consumerism and wage levels: Evidence from an experimental market

This paper contributes to the promotion of multidisciplinary research on ethical consumerism by providing experimental evidence on consumer's willingness to reward sellers by paying higher wages to their workers. We analyze repeated interactions occurring between workers, sellers, and consumers within the framework of an experimental market. By successfully performing a task, workers allow sellers to offer a good through a market. Sellers set the price of goods and decide the wages of workers. Consumers enter the market sequentially and decide whether to accept one of the offers or to leave the market. Our data show that, especially in the first periods of the experiment, some sellers opt to pay high wages to their workers. However, this behavior is not rewarded by consumers, whose purchasing choices are almost exclusively driven by self-interest. In our interpretation, the connection between workers and sellers that connotes our experimental design, with workers who allow sellers to enter the market, may induce consumers to believe that eventual sacrifices for paying high wages to workers must be entirely on sellers. Our result suggests that the more salient is made the importance of some stakeholders in allowing the firm's activity, the fewer consumers' may be willing to sacrifice their monetary payoff to improve these stakeholders' condition.     

Feature-weighted categorized play across symmetric games

Experimental Economics - Experimental game theory studies the behavior of agents who face a stream of one-shot games as a form of learning. Most literature focuses on a single recurring identical...     

The Evolution of Income Composition Inequality in Italy, 1989–2016

We study the evolution of inequality in income composition in terms of capital and labor income in Italy between 1989 and 2016. We document a rise in the share of capital income accruing to the bottom of the distribution, while the top of the distribution increases its share of labor income. This implies a falling degree of income composition inequality in the period considered and a weaker relationship between the functional and personal distribution of income in Italy. This result is robust to various specifications of self-employment income; nonetheless, it hinges crucially on the treatment of rental incomes. While the dynamics of imputed rents has brought about a more equitable distribution of capital incomes across the income distribution, that of actual rents has led to higher concentration of capital incomes at the top in the decade preceding the outbreak of the financial crisis. Finally, we conceptualize a rule of thumb for policy makers seeking to reduce income inequality in the long run.