Corruption as an Alternative to Limit Pricing

We explore to what extent bribery can be an alternative way of fighting rivals’ entry on the market when there is uncertainty about the degree of corruption in the public sector. For high levels of corruption, “covert” fight through bribery is the optimal choice of an incumbent. For low degree of corruption, instead, the incumbent prefers to act strategically but overtly by playing a limit pricing game.Corruption, Bribery, Production licence, Moral cost, Covert/overt fight

Occupation and working outcomes during the Coronavirus Pandemic

Using data from the recent SHARE COVID-19 survey and additional information collected in the previous waves of SHARE, we explore the effects of occupation’s characteristics on two outcomes: (i) the probability of work interruptions during the pandemic, coupled with the length of such interruptions and (ii) the probability of switching to homeworking during the lockdown. In order to assess how job features affected the likelihood of having experienced work interruptions or shifted to teleworking, we define six occupation categories by classifying the ISCO job titles according to two criteria: the safety level of the occupation and the essential (unessential) nature of the good or service provided. We find that characteristics of the occupation are major determinants of the probability of experiencing work interruptions and determine the length of such interruptions. Working from home also largely depends on the features of the job, even controlling for many other covariates at the individual level. In addition, we show that labour market outcomes of women, self-employed and less educated workers are negatively affected by the pandemic to a much larger extent than men

Economics of Adverse Childhood Treatment

The individuals’ well-being throughout their entire lives depends on their initial inherited endowments, on their/their parents’ subsequent investments and actions as well as on the environment in which they grow, act, and live. The recent literature in various fields, starting with the epidemiological/psychological one but also the sociologic and economic research, point out that early life (childhood and adolescence) is crucial in determining a set of late life outcomes, from health to education, socioeconomic status, income, etc. In this sense, adverse events/trauma in these life stages become of paramount importance since, from an economics perspective, they can be assimilated to “negative” investments. Indeed, a continuously extending literature documents that adverse childhood and adolescence experiences (ACEs) are associated with poor physical and mental health, unhealthy life styles, poor schooling performances, lower levels of education, higher unemployment, and lower income, with extremely high economic burden for the individuals and the society. Such evidence calls for sound and targeted policy interventions that to prevent adverse events in early offspring’s lives and to mitigate and correct as much as possible the negative effects for those children that were subject to trauma

15 What is the future of (remote) work?

Among the individuals who worked continuously since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, around 22% of men and 30% of women were working remotely in both waves of the SHARE Corona survey. Only 10% of the workers in our sample were initially working remotely, and then moved back to their usual workplace. Remote work adoption varied depending on the technical feasibility of performing a job remotel

Adverse childhood experiences and risk behaviours later in life: Evidence from SHARE countries.

In this paper we investigate whether exposure to adverse experiences during childhood such as physical and emotional abuse affects the likelihood of unhealthy habits and separately the insurgency of chronic diseases and disabilities later in life. The novelty of our approach consists in exploiting the recently published data on adverse childhood experiences for 19 SHARE countries, which enables us to account for country-specific heterogeneity and investigate the long-run effects of exposure to adverse early-life circumstances on risk behaviour such as smoking, drinking, overweight and obesity. Our results highlight a significant positive effect of exposure to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) on the probability of unhealthy lifestyles as well as on the insurgency of chronic diseases and disabilities in the long run

Immigration and the utilization of preventive care in Europe : Results from retrospective data

Preprin

Immigration and the utilization of preventive care in Europe: Results from retrospective data

We used retrospective information from the Survey on Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) to analyze the utilization patterns of preventive care around the time of migration of a representative sample of migrants in Europe. We find heterogeneous behaviours across different types of preventive care. Migrants increase the utilization of dental care significantly as soon as they reach the host country compared to the years immediately before migration, while migrant women increase their use of blood pressure tests, gynaecological visits, and mammogram tests progressively after migration. Other types of care do not exhibit particular patterns in relation to the migration episode. We also observe relevant differences in preventive care use around migration by country of origin. Our results suggest that preventive care use by migrants cannot be given for granted and is intimately linked to the process of integration in the host countr