Working Papers
Di Cataldo, M. & Romani, G., 2023. Rational cuts? The local impact of closing undersized schools
The paper investigates the demographic and income effects of rationalisation policies in the field of public schooling by focusing on the Italian context (2010-2019). We assess whether school closures have an impact on households’ residential choices, on top and beyond preexisting negative population trends which motivate school closures. We address endogeneity by combining a two-way-fixed-effects estimation with an instrumental variable approach, constructing the IV on the basis of institutional thresholds for school sizing adopted by some Italian Regions. We find evidence that schooling rationalisation policies, by fostering depopulation of peripheral areas, has an influence on the spatial distribution of households and income, thus affecting territorial disparities.
[Ca' Foscari Economic Department Working Paper Series][LSE - Geography and Environment Discussion Paper Series]
Brugiavini, A., Di Cataldo, M. & Romani, G., 2023. Knowledge economy, internal migration, and the effect on local labour markets
Data access was provided through the VisitINPS scholars programme
Human-capital intensive activities tend to concentrate in space and may generate significant multiplicative effects at the local level. This paper assesses how the relative growth of knowledge-intensive jobs and the inflow of workers in knowledge sectors affect wage, employment, and probability of outmigration of local workers in other sectors. We focus on Italy during the 2005-2019 period, taking advantage of matched employer-employee administrative data covering the universe of social-security-paying workers. To address identification concerns, we implement a two-step procedure combined with an IV strategy. We find
evidence that the growth in knowledge-intensive jobs and related migrations have multiplicative effects on local employment, and they reduce the probability of outmigration.
[Workinps Paper Series]
Buscemi, T. & Romani, G., 2024. Allocation of authority and tactical redistribution of public investments: A historical quasi-experiment
Devolution of authority over public investments can lead to agency problems and trigger tactical redistribution between different tiers of government. We test this hypothesis in the context of the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno: a massive development programme for Southern Italy (1950-1984). By 1971, the authority over funds allocation was transferred from a centralised committee to the newborn regional governments. We combine unique historical data on local administrators with detailed information on projects, and find that, after devolution, municipalities aligned with the regional government were assigned a higher number of projects, without producing any positive impact on long-run economic outcomes.
[Ca' Foscari Economic Department Working Paper Series]