Community conversations as a strategy to change harmful traditional practices against women

This article conducts a series of list experiments to detect whether community conversations contribute to a change in thinking about harmful traditional practices in Ethiopia. While our findings are mixed, we provide evidence that community conversations are indeed a valuable instrument to induce a change in social values in order to empower women.     

Gender Gaps in Social Capital: A Theoretical Interpretation of Evidence from Italy

This study uses the Italian data from the Multiscopo surveys of 1997 and 2011 to assess differences in life-cycle accumulation of social capital by sex and age. First, the study identifies some crucial aspects regarding the definition and measurement of social capital: individual versus collective dimension, different typologies of social capital, and the fact that the literature often deals with women in social capital but seldom with gender. Second, using a regression analysis with cross-sectional data, it shows that social capital accumulation along the life cycle is different for men and women, with men accumulating more social capital at all ages, with a different peak and overall profile. The study also shows that, over fifteen years, the gap in social capital by sex narrowed. Finally, it introduces a model of social capital structure compatible with the empirical evidence and with notions of gender as defined in feminist literature.     

Contagion across Eurozone’s sovereign spreads and the Core-Periphery divide

This paper investigates the causes of disproportionate increases of sovereign yields with respect to the interest rate on the 10 years German Bund within the Eurozone. Empirical evidence drawn from the Bank for International Settlements dataset on banks’ portfolios shows that rapid financial integration, following the launch of the monetary union, resulted in excess exposure of Core countries’ banks in the Peripheral countries’ financial assets. In order to endogenize the possibility of contagion effects, we conduct econometric estimates through a Global Vector Autoregressive model, where each country’s spread depends upon all Eurozone countries’ spreads. Results show that after the burst of the financial crisis the Core countries’ sovereign yields are essentially determined by the international risk aversion, whereas the spreads of Peripheral countries mainly depend on fundamentals, namely the public debt/GDP ratio and the Real Effective Exchange Rate values with respect to the Eurozone average. These results are supported by the estimate of an impulse response analysis. Macroeconomic failures in public finances and competitiveness seem to originate the exceptional increases in sovereign spreads of the Periphery, through a contagion effect which is limited to this group of Eurozone countries.     

Storm surge disaster risk management: the Xynthia case study in France

In recent years, a series of catastrophic storm surges have occurred in Europe. The large number of fatalities and high material damage are mainly due to an increase in vulnerability and exposure to coastal flooding of hit regions. It is, therefore, necessary to intensify research activities in order to better understand this kind of disasters, to reduce their impacts and to reinforce risk management. This study describes the consequences of Xynthia windstorm that hit France in 2010: strong wind gusts, associated to high-coefficient tides and very low pressure, caused a phenomenon of storm surge in the Atlantic coastal area of France. Sea walls, lacking maintenance and originally built to defend agricultural land, were not able to protect houses. Fourty-seven people were killed, most of them from drowning, and direct losses amounted to more than 2.5?billion Euros. Around 10,000 people were forced to evacuate after the inundation of their properties. Uncontrolled urbanization was involved in the increase of stakes, as demonstrated by the fact that all the 29 victims in the city of la Faute-sur-Mer were living in houses built after 1980. The paper describes the event considering the aspect of increased vulnerability in the affected area, the lack of preparedness that exacerbated the final damage, the emergency response phases and the adaptation strategies adopted by the French Government after the disaster. We conclude that an attentive governance should include a balanced approach to risk protection, to reduce vulnerability and exposure.     

Vertical disintegration and training: evidence from a matched employer–employee survey

The mechanism through which outsourcing favourably impacts on workplace performance, particularly productivity, is still unclear. I explore the hypothesis that it does so by impacting workers?? training. I use AWIRS-1995, a matched employer?Cemployee survey that reports ample information on the extent of technology and organizational change in Australian workplaces. I find that there is a positive and significant impact of outsourcing on training when I do not control for the correlation between ununobservable factors in these two binary outcomes. However, once I control for this correlation using a bivariate probit estimator, the training impact of outsourcing becomes negative. I then assess the sensitivity of the outsourcing effect to endogeneity by using the method advocated by Altonji et?al. (J Polit Econ 113(1):151?C184, 2005) to find that this latter result persists even in the presence of a low correlation between unobservables.     

With a little help from abroad: The effect of low-skilled immigration on the female labour supply

We examine whether and how the inflow of female immigrants who specialize in household production affects the labour supply of Italian women. To identify the causal effect, we exploit the family reunification motives and network effects (i.e., the tendency of newly arriving female immigrants to settle in places where males of the same country already live) which is used as an instrument for the geographical distribution of female foreign workers. We find that when the number of immigrants who provide household services is higher, native Italian women spend more time at work (intensive margin) without affecting their labour force participation (extensive margin). This impact is concentrated on highly skilled women whose time has a higher opportunity cost. These results also hold after a battery of robustness checks. We present some further evidence that is also consistent with the idea that the impact works through substitution in household work rather than complementarities in the production sector. Finally, we show that immigration arises as a substitute to publicly provided welfare services, although this phenomenon raises concerns regarding the fairness and sustainability of this private and informal welfare model.     

The Contribution of Longitudinal Research to the Study of Women's Poverty

Quality &; Quantity - The aim of this article is to discuss some of the central conceptual and methodological issues which must be tackled if we wish to investigate poverty in a gender-sensitive...     

Pandemetrics: systematically assessing,monitoring, and controlling the evolution of a pandemic

Quality & Quantity - The still ongoing pandemic of SARS-CoV-2 virus and COVID-19 disease, affecting the population worldwide, has demonstrated the need of more accurate methodologies for...     

Restructuring financial systems in transition and developing economies: an approach based on the French financial system

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate on the redesigning of financial systems in Central and Eastern European and developing countries by focusing attention on specific financial institutions appropriate to easing the transition and fostering the creation of markets. The paper argues that the immediate emulation of the better-known institutions of the most developed, market-based financial systems, i.e. the US and the UK, should not be taken for granted. It underlines, instead, the importance of drawing inspiration from the experiences of a variety of institutions and financial systems. Particularly relevant are those systems that have experienced forms of transition and a mix, over time, of market and state intervention.
The approach of this paper is one of institutional financial economics (Neave, 1991 and Williamson, 1986), in which structural details of financial institutions and contracts, in our case French financial institutions, are analysed. We argue that the principles on which some French financial institutions are based and aspects of their functioning are of value to reformers. We discuss the lessons that can be learnt from the Crédit National, the Commissariat Général du Plan, the CODEVI and the SOFARIS.