Giorgio Di Maio

• MS Management Engineering
• University of Insubria

We studied the effects of a pilot project that strengthened savings incentive mechanisms. The project was established by The Small Enterprise Foundation (SEF), a leading microfinance institution based in South Africa. The program introduced a savings stimulus in the form of a Goal Card: clients subscribing to this (non-coercive) tool were required...

A quasi-natural experiment has been carried out at The Small Enterprise Foundation, a South African microfinance institution offering group lending with joint liability. In a pilot project, the frequency of meetings was reduced from fortnightly to monthly and the members of the groups were no more required to attend all the meetings but they could...

This study uses a randomized control trial to evaluate the outcome of integrating money management and entrepreneurial training into a microcredit program in India. We find positive and significant effects on clients' financial management skills and entrepreneurship abilities, particularly for clients with higher human capital, or more diligent, or...

This study investigates the efficiency of suspicious transaction reporting activity to a financial intelligence unit as a means to deter money laundering. Baseline and two-province theoretical models are used to frame the empirical analysis. The latter examines the relationship between suspicious transaction reporting and the vulnerability of Itali...

Social networking sites are an increasingly important tool for career development, especially for highly skilled individuals. Moreover, they may constitute valuable sources of data for scholars and policy mak- ers. However, little research has been conducted on the use by highly skilled individuals of those social networks. In this paper, we focus...

This study aims to investigate the demographic, social, and economic drivers of rising abstention and populist electoral success in Italy in 2018. The Italian case is unique in the euro area because, in the political elections of 4 March 2018, two parties usually identified as left-wing and right-wing populists (Movimento 5 Stelle and Lega) obtaine...

Excessive and useless reporting, called the “crying wolf effect,” is a crucial shortcoming that any anti-money laundering (AML) design aims to address. For this reason, in recent years, AML policies in both the US and Europe have switched from a rule-based to a risk-based approach. This study theoretically and empirically investigates whether the r...

DESCRIPTION This paper introduces in statistics the notion of the barycenter of the distribution of a non-negative random variable and explores its relation with the Gini index, the concentration area, and the Gini’s mean difference. The introduction of the barycenter allows for new economic, geometrical, physical, and statistical interpretations o...

Balance of Inequality; Barycenter, Barycentric income, Gini index; Gini Concentration Ratio; Gini coefficient; Inequality; Inequality measurement; Lorenz curve; Pen parade; The rich and the poor.

Balance of Inequality; Barycenter; Gini index; Gini Concentration Ratio; Gini coefficient; Inequality; Inequality decomposition by population subgroups; Inequality measurement.

Balance of Inequality (BOI) index, Center of mass, Gini index, Inequality decomposition by population subgroups, Inequality measurement, R concentration ratio, United States, Gender inequality

This paper examines the economy's vulnerability to money laundering in a given region. Assuming that criminals are rational investors who take into account risks and returns of both legal and illegal investments, we define vulnerability as a function of well-identified drivers. Proxies of these variables are used to empirically investigate the rela...

The Balance of Inequality (BOI) is a new approach to the measurement of inequality in which each individual is given a mass equal to his/her income, the population is aligned at regular intervals in order by income, and the center of mass of the income distribution is used to measure its inequality. The BOI index features an intuitive physical inte...

Presentation of the paper ”The Balance of Inequality: A rediscovery of the Gini’s R concentration ratio and a new inequality decomposition by population subgroups based on a physical rationale” available at http://www.ecineq.org/ecineq_nyc17/FILESx2017/CR2/p195.pdf

The Balance of Inequality (BOI) is a new approach to the measurement of inequality in which each individual is given a mass equal to his/her income, the population is aligned at regular intervals in order by income, and the center of mass of the income distribution is used to measure its inequality. The BOI index features an intuitive physical inte...

Published open access: Journal of African Economies, DOI: 10.1093/jae/ejab004

A better understanding of loan repayment behavior of borrowers can contribute to the development of microfinance. This paper investigates the repayment performance of borrowers of a nonprofit Indian microfinance institution, the Indian Institute for Mother and Child – IIMC, using a novel data set. We collected raw data on more than 1600 borrowers,...

The aim of the paper is to introduce and clarify the financial and non-financial characteristics of the microcredit programs based on a credit guarantee scheme, i.e. Indirect Microcredit Models (IMMs). IMMs are emerging models of microcredit in high-income countries able to combine the contribution of the public sector, non-profit sector or sociall...

The aim of the paper is to introduce and clarify the financial and non-financial characteristics of microcredit programs based on a credit guarantee. We call these programs, which are widespread in Europe, Indirect Microcredit Programs (IMPs) because they use an indirect microcredit model. We discuss their differences with respect to the traditiona...

In this paper, we show how the inequality of the income distribution of a population can be measured with the percentile income shares, or with the mean income of each percentile and the mean income of the population, with a negligible error. The results, obtained using the Balance of Inequality index, also apply for the Gini index.

Most Microfinance institutions (MFIs) worldwide focus their efforts in relieving the poor from financial constraints through micro-loans. This research focuses on integrating a money management and entrepreneurial training plan to a lending program in a non-profit MFI in Kolkata, India. The paper’s main purpose is to measure the marginal impact of...