Massimiliano Bratti

• Ph.D. in Economics (University of Warwick)
• Professor at University of Milan

In this paper, we exploit pension reform-induced changes in retirement eligibility requirements to assess the role of grandparental childcare availability in the labor force participation of women with children under 15. Our analysis shows that, among the women studied, those whose own mothers are retirement eligible have a 11% higher probability o...

Western countries, was in the spotlight during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020 due to its high mortality rates. Simple regional comparisons are, however, hampered by potentially unobservable variables affecting mortality, such as the virus spread. To address this ‘unobserved heterogeneity’ concern, we adopt a Difference in Geographic Regress...

This study leverages detailed administrative data on firms’ job flows and differences across Local Labor Markets (LLMs) in the spread of COVID-19 to investigate shifts in labor demand prompted by the pandemic in Italy. Namely, we investigate the effect of COVID-19 on the composition of new hires in terms of jobs suitable for “working from home” (WF...

Although researchers acknowledge the key role of language in immigrant integration, empirical analyses on how proficiency in Italian differently shape the social outcomes of immigrants living in Italy are limited. Using the Italian Survey on Social Condition and Integration of Foreign Citizens, we model individual demographic and linguistic pattern...

This article investigates whether and to what extent poor proficiency in Italian impairs immigrants’ labor market integration in Italy. Using individual-level survey data, we apply instrumental variables methods to leverage presumably exogenous variations in Italian proficiency induced by immigrants’ demo-linguistic characteristics (e.g., age at ar...

erit requirements in need-based student aid may exacerbate inequality in higher education but at the same time improve efficiency of aid expenditure by increasing on-time graduation, for instance. Disentangling the effect of the two building blocks of student aid (“need” and “merit”) is therefore of key interest to policy makers. In this paper, we...

Although features of the higher education degree programmes in which students are enrolled are likely to have an impact on their academic careers, primarily because of data limitations, research has mainly focused on individual, household and higher education institution drivers of student performance. To fill this knowledge gap, this chapter prese...

We analyze the effectiveness of a vocational training (VT) programme targeting unemployed youth in Latvia, contributing to the scant literature on active labour market policies in transition countries. The programme we analyse is part of the Youth Guarantee scheme (2014–2020), the largest action launched by the European Union to combat youth unempl...

Merit requirements in need-based student aid may exacerbate inequality in higher education but at the same time improve efficiency of aid expenditure by increasing on-time graduation, for instance. Disentangling the effect of the two building blocks of student aid ("need" and "merit") is therefore of key interest to policy makers. In this paper, we...

This paper investigates the consequences of prenatal exposure to hot temperatures on child health in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) using a novel indicator of heat waves (the Heat Wave Magnitude Index daily). Leveraging several geo-referenced waves of the Demographic and Health Surveys merged with gridded data on the presence of heat waves and their magn...

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the potential benefits of implementing performance based university research funding systems (PRFSs) in terms of both the quantity and «quality» (i.e. citation impact) of research outputs (measured through the Web of Science database). The Italian experience of the first two Research Evaluation Exercises is e...

In this paper we leverage a labour market reform (Fornero Law) which reduced firing restrictions for open-ended contracts in the case of firms with more than 15 employees in Italy. The results from a Difference in Regression Discontinuities design demonstrate that after the reform, the number of trained workers increased in firms just above the thr...

This paper investigates the consequences of prenatal exposure to hot temperatures on child health in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) using a novel indicator of heat waves (the Heat Wave Magnitude Index daily). Leveraging several geo-referenced waves of the Demographic and Health Surveys merged with gridded data on the presence of heat waves and their magn...

The Eduscopio project is the first attempt to build school performance indicators based on the university performance of high school leavers in Italy. It provides stakeholders (students and their families) with publicly available school performance indicators, and school rankings. A potential weakness of Eduscopio is that it relies on first-year st...

A number of studies examine the effect of the presence of migrants or refugees on voting behaviour in the same location, overlooking potential interactions between geographical areas. Exploiting unique data on refugee reception centre locations, we provide novel empirical evidence on the geographical spillover effect of refugee premises on voting o...

We investigate the impact of fertility and demographic factors on the Great Mexico–USA immigration by assessing the causal effects of sibship size and structure on migration decisions within the household. We use a rich demographic survey on the population of Mexico and exploit presumably exogenous variation in family size induced by biological fer...

This paper demonstrates the positive effect of immigrant entrepreneurs on manufacturing exports over and above that of diasporas. Using small‐scale regional administrative data, our instrumental variables estimates of export gravity models imply that ceteris paribus, i.e. holding constant the total number of immigrants, the expected pro‐trade effec...

This paper investigates whether or not research quality is significantly associated with a university's ability to attract students from other provinces in Italy. First-university enrolments of students over the period 2003-11 are regressed on universities' research-quality indicators computed from various bibliometric databases using fixed-effects...

This paper examines the impact of introducing a Research Evaluation Exercise (REE) on Italian undergraduate students’ enrolment choices. We investigate whether subject groups in higher education institutions (HEIs) that performed better in the REE also benefited from more student enrolments and the enrolment of students with better entry qualificat...

This paper evaluates the impact of a vocational training programme on the labour market outcomes of unemployed youth in Latvia. The programme is part of the Youth Guarantee scheme for the period 2014-2020, the largest action launched by the European Union to reduce youth unemployment rate and to support young people aged between 15 and 29 who are n...

This paper uses European firm-level survey data to provide some robust empirical evidence that suppliers engaged in production to order (PTO) for foreign firms are more likely to introduce product innovations than those engaged in PTO for domestic firms, even when differences in size, R&D and productivity are controlled for. We propose a demand-dri...

In this study, we leverage on Italy's size-contingent firing restrictions to identify the causal effect of employment protection legislation (EPL) on firm-provided training using a regression discontinuity design. Our analysis demonstrates that higher levels of EPL reduce incentives for firms to invest in workers' training. The number of trained wo...

In this paper we highlight a new complementary channel to the business and social network effect à la Rauch (2001) through which immigrants generate increased export flows from the regions in which they settle to their countries of origin: they can become entrepreneurs. Using very small-scale (NUTS-3) administrative data on immigrants' location in...

This paper studies the impact of the first Italian Research Evaluation Exercise (VTR 2001-2003) on university undergraduate students' enrolment choices. A before-after estimator with differential treatment intensities is used to investigate whether subject-group higher education institutions (HEIs) that had a higher performance in the VTR also bene...

This paper investigates the effect of immigration on innovation in Italy, a country characterized by prevalently unskilled immigration. After addressing the potential endogeneity of the share of immigrants in the population using immigrant enclaves, no evidence is found of either positive or negative effects of migrants on innovation. This result i...

This paper examines the impact of war trauma experienced during the 1992-1995 Bosnia and Herzegovina conflict on individual mental health. By using a medically-validated depression scale and an instrumental-variable approach we show that, six years after the conflict, traumatised individuals are significantly more likely to be at risk of depression...

This paper investigates the causal effect of immigration on trade flows using Italian panel data at the province level. We exploit the exceptional characteristics of the Italian data (the fine geographical disaggregation, the very high number of countries of origin of immigrants, the high heterogeneity of social and economic characteristics of Ital...

We exploit presumably exogenous variation in the availability of college-educated workers at the province level produced by a reform that increased the supply of higher education to estimate human capital production externalities for Italian manufacturing firms. We show that when the potential endogeneity of local human capital is addressed, the el...

This paper provides new empirical evidence on the impact of parental health shocks on investments in children's education using detailed longitudinal data from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Our study controls for individual unobserved heterogeneity by using child fixed effects, and it accounts for potential misreporting of self-reported health by employi...

We investigate the impact of delaying the first birth on Italian mothers’ labor market outcomes around childbirth. The effect of postponing motherhood is identified using biological fertility shocks; namely, the occurrence of miscarriages and stillbirths. Focusing on mothers’ behavior around the first birth, our study is able to isolate the effect...

In this paper we investigate the effect of lecture attendance and self-study on undergraduate students’ academic performance. We first introduce a simple theoretical model in which students decide the optimal allocation of their time between lecture attendance, self-study and leisure. Under some assumptions, we find a positive relationship between...

A firm’s export status may improve its ability to introduce product innovations (learning by exporting). We explore this idea using very rich firm-level data on Italian manufacturing, which enables us to control for many confounding factors in the exporting–product innovation link (i.e. selection on observable variables). We also make an attempt to...

In this paper we investigate the causal effect of immigration on trade flows, using Italian panel data covering very small geographical units (NUTS-3). Exploiting the very favorable setup offered by Italy's features – the very high number of countries of origin of immigrants ('super-diversity'), the high heterogeneity of social and economic charact...

In March 2000 the European Council set out an ambitious target for female employment rates in Lisbon, which should reach the level of 60% by 2010. However, Italy is very far from reaching this target. Indeed, according to the Italian National Statistical Institute (Istat) 2003 official data, only 42% of women aged 14–64 were in employment and less...

We examine the effect of delaying motherhood on the transition to the second childbirth across European countries. There exist two opposite forces of delaying the first birth: biological and socio-cultural factors producing a postponement effect and career-related factors leading to a catch-up effect. Estimating a multistate duration model that add...

In this paper we investigate how the structure of the educational system, in particular the presence of tracking in secondary schools, is associated with the intergenerational transmission of educational advantage. We study two countries (Italy and Germany) that are both characterized by tracking in secondary schools, although the details of the tw...

In 2001 a university reform (also known as the “3+2”) shortening the length of undergraduate studies in most college majors was introduced in Italy. We use the 2004 cohort of university leavers to investigate differences in social gradients between university graduates from “short” (3-year) and “long” (pre-reform) degrees in some educational and em...

In this paper, we propose an estimator for models in which an endogenous dichotomous treatment affects a count outcome in the presence of either sample selection or endogenous participation using maximum simulated likelihood. We allow for the treatment to have an effect on the participation or the sample selection rule and on the main outcome. Appl...

Evidence on the role of parental health on child schooling is surprisingly thin. We explore this issue by estimating the short-run effects of parents’ illness on child school enrollment. Our analysis is based on household panel data from Bosnia-Herzegovina, a country whose health and educational systems underwent extensive destruction during the 19...

This paper presents empirical evidence from the Programme for International Student Assessment 2003 survey on the role of students' attitudes towards competition and cooperation in mathematical literacy achievement. While individual competitive attitudes are positively correlated with test scores, the reverse occurs when considering the aggregation...

In this paper we propose a method to estimate models in which an endogenous dichotomous treatment affects a count outcome in the presence of either sample selection or endogenous participation using maximum simulated likelihood. We allow for the treatment to have an effect on both the sample selection or the participation rule and the main outcome....

In this paper we investigate the effect of the restructuring of university studies that took place in Italy after the introduction of the "3+2" reform on student time allocation and performance. We use data from an Economics Faculty and propensity score matching, which allow us to account for many confounding factors that are likely to affect the b...

In a period of expanding higher education, the field of study becomes a key determinant of university graduates' labour market success. In this paper, by means of multivariate analyses of the quality of graduates' early employment outcomes, we first describe how the effect of different fields of study on the university-to-work transition changed be...

This paper investigates whether higher education (HE) produces non-pecuniary returns via a reduction in the intensity of consumption of health-damaging substances. In particular, it focuses on current smoking intensity of the British individuals sampled in the 29-year follow-up survey of the 1970 British Cohort Study. We estimate endogenous dummy o...

In this presentation we define two qualitatitive response models: 1) Selection Endogenous Dummy Ordered Probit model (SED-OP); 2) a Selection Endogenous Dummy Dynamic Selection Ordered Probit model (SED- DOP). The SED-OP model is a three-equation model constituted of an endogenous dummy equation, a selection equation, and a main equation which has...

Estimates of a high average return to a degree for UK graduates have provided a policy rationale for increasing the share of the costs of higher education borne by UK students over recent decades. We use evidence from a cohort of people born in 1970 to estimate hourly wage returns to a university degree. We analyse the extent of variations around a...

Discussione su alcuni aspetti del lavoro: 1) Scelta della metologia (PSM-DID); 2) Diagnostica su PSM-DID; 3) Questioni relative all’applicazione specifica.

This paper studies the role of the expansion of higher education (HE) in increasing the equality of tertiary education opportunities. We examine Italy's experience during the 1990s, when policy changes prompted HE institutions to offer a wider range of degrees and to open new sites in neighbouring provinces. Our analysis focuses on non-mature full-...

We use a unique data set providing administrative information on earnings by skill-level (blue collars, white collars), on the local stock of human capital and on several firm’s characteristics, including balance sheet data, to investigate the size of localized human capital externalities in Italian manufacturing. Our estimates do not show any evid...

This paper provides a survey on studies that analyze the macroeconomic effects of intellectual property rights (IPR). The first part of this paper introduces different patent policy instruments and reviews their effects on R&D and economic growth. This part also discusses the distortionary effects and distributional consequences of IPR protection a...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe the hypothesis of effort-based career opportunities as a situation in which profit maximising firms create incentives for employees to work longer hours than the bargained ones, by making career prospects depend on working hours. The paper aims to test some implications of this hypothesis using UK...

This paper investigates the effect of parents’ income on children’s drop-out from school at age 16 using data from the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70). Unlike previous papers using the same data set, we use a continuous measure of income derived from the grouped income variable available in the BCS70, we employ instrumental variable techniques to...

In this paper we investigate the existence and the size of territorial differences in Italian students’ mathematical competencies. Our analysis benefits from a new data set that merges the 2003 wave of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) with territorial data collected from several statistical sources and with administrat...

As in many other countries, government policy in the UK has the objective of raising the participation rate of young people in higher education, while also increasing the share of the costs of higher education borne by students themselves. A rationale for the latter element comes from evidence of a high private return to university undergraduate de...

In this paper we investigate the existence and the size of geographical differences in Italian students’ mathematical competencies. We analyze a novel data set that combines the 2003 wave of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) with information about local economic conditions and school-level administrative data. We find t...

In this paper we investigate the existence and the size of geographical differences in Italian students’ mathematical competencies. We analyze a novel data set that combines the 2003 wave of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) with information about local economic conditions and school-level administrative data. We find t...

After the "3+2" University reform in Italy there has been a fast increase in the number of students. A common wisdom is that this result was partly achieved by reducing the standard of Higher Education (HE). In this paper we first build a theoretical model in which individuals decide whether to enrol in HE along with their optimal course quality, a...

Research on the transition from school to work is increasingly focusing on the horizontal stratification of educational systems, that is on how different educational tracks have an effect on students’ occupational chances. In the case of tertiary education, this means analyzing how different fields of study (faculties) make a difference in this tra...

In 2001 a '3+2' (unitary two-tier) university system was introduced in Italy where a 3-year First Level degree followed by a 2-year Second Level degree replaced a one-tier system where the 'old' degree (Laurea) duration varied between a minimum of four (e.g. economics) and a maximum of six years. In this paper we use individual-level data on gradua...

Although past research has found strong social class effects on the decision to undertake higher education in the UK, there is only sparse empirical work investigating social class influences on the choice of degree subject at the undergraduate level. Using Universities’ Statistical Record data for the period 1981-1991, we find no social class effe...

In this paper, we develop an econometric model to estimate the impacts of Electronic Vehicle Management Systems (EVMS) on the load factor (LF) of heavy trucks using data at the operational level. This technology is supposed to improve capacity utilization by reducing coordination costs between demand and supply. The model is estimated on a subsampl...

As in many other countries, government policy in the UK has the objective of raising the participation rate of young people in higher education, while increasing the share of the costs of higher education paid by students themselves. A rationale for the latter element comes from evidence of a high private return to university undergraduate degrees....

 < In this paper we use newly available individual-level data from the Longitudinal Survey of Italian Households to investigate the factors associated with female labour force participation after the birth of the first child. We focus on the role of pre-marital job characteristics and find that new mothers who worked without a contract are less lik...

The bulk of the literature on the Skill-Biased Technological Change (SBTC) hypothesis has focused on the US and the UK, while evidence on other countries is ‘mixed’. We use firm-level data to test for the presence of SBTC in Italian manufacturing. The interest stems from the fact that Italy is a “late comer” country, suffers a gap in new technologi...

Official employment-related performance indicators in UK higher education are based on the population of students responding to the ‘First destination supplement’ (FDS). This generates potentially biased performance indicators as this population of students is not necessarily representative of the full population of leavers from each institution. U...

The aim of this paper is to perform a theoretically-based empirical analysis concerning the impact of demography on economic growth via the accumulation of human capital. Although the direct effects of demographic variables on economic growth have been widely investigated in the economic literature, research on the indirect effects that demography...