Are we spending too much to grow? The case of Structural Funds

We evaluate whether the impact of EU Structural and Cohesion Funds (EUF) on Member States’ regional economic growth depends on the intensity of treatment, measured by the normalized amount of funds distributed in each region. We use an original dataset that covers all the main sources of EUF and extend the regression discontinuity design to the case of continuous treatment. The results suggest an average positive effect on regional growth. The estimated conditional intensity-growth function is concave and presents a maximum value. Therefore, the exceeding funds could have been allocated to other lagging regions without reducing the effect on growth

Identifying Variation in Learner Outcomes by Further Education Provider

This report presents results of a project to investigate how the labour market outcomes secured by individual learners vary across Further Education (FE) Providers. The research is the latest in a series of studies previously commissioned by BIS (now BEIS) of ILR-WPLS1 administrative data that estimate the value added of Further Education, as reflected in the Earnings, Employment and Benefit premiums secured by FE learners. This programme of investigation identifies good labour market returns to FE learning, and compelling evidence that previous less favourable findings (relating to vocationally- oriented learning at Level 2 and below) were a result of data limitations, rather than insignificant value added

Developments in the evaluation of capital subsidy policies

Essay 1: A critical survey on capital subsidy policies. Despite the long history of capital subsidies in most developed countries and the numerous evaluations of their effectiveness, there is no comprehensive survey in the literature. This essay aims to provide a complete review of the most relevant research works in such literature highlighting their main findings. Besides, the core threats to internal validity and the main issues that a researcher has to face in order to deliver a robust evaluation work are stressed. Essay 2: The causal impact of capital subsidies: a multiple regression discontinuity design approach. This essay analyses the impact of a policy instrument - Law 488/92 (L488), the main Italian regional policy - that allocates subsidies to private firms by a multiple ranking system. Thanks to the peculiar L488 selection process that creates the conditions for a local random experiment, we are able to assess the effectiveness of these types of incentives for a relevant subgroup of firms. We propose a nonparametric multiple rankings regression discontinuity design that exploits the sharp discontinuities in the L488 rankings and extends the regression discontinuity design (RDD) approach to a context where the treatment is assigned by multiple rankings with different cut-off points. We find that the impact of the subsidies on employment, investment, and turnover is positive and statistically significant, while the effect on productivity is mostly negligible. The new subsidised capital is additional but non-complementary with the owner-financed investment. The results are robust to different specifications and not due to intertemporal substitution. Essay 3: Beyond the SUTVA: how policy evaluations change when we allow for interactions among firms. The shortage of studies on spatial spillovers of industrial policies is rather surprising considering that such policies are usually designed for generating spatial externalities. In Essay 3 we try to fill this gap proposing a new framework that partially relaxes the SUTVA assuming that a firm might interact only with firms having a limited economic distance from it (e.g. firms that belong to the same sector of activity) and that the intensity of these interactions is diminishing in distance and it does not extend over a certain threshold. This allows us to contrast the positive agglomeration effects with the negative cross-sectional substitution and the crowding-out effect. The global evaluation of the ATT and the spillover parameters shifts the spotlight from the policy effect on subsidised firms to the global effect of the industrial policy on the targeted territory making possible to determine if the subsidies have had a welfare-enhancing role in the underdeveloped regions. Analysing the effectiveness of the Italian L488 policy on firms located in peripheral areas, we find - in line with most of the literature - a positive and large effect of the policy on subsidised firms in terms of investment, turnover, and employment; however, the employment growth is in part determined to the detriment of affected untreated firms located in the very proximity of one or more treated firms that belong to the same sector of activity. This finding suggests that the ATT on itself is not a sufficient parameter to evaluate the effectiveness of an industrial policy and that we cannot rule out the possibility that the substitution effect (firms substitute labour with capital) might be in place

Returns to Maths and English Learning (at level 2 and below) in Further Education

Previous work identifies good labour market returns for FE learners who gain qualifications at Full Level 2 and above. Estimates of the returns to learning at ‘Below Level 2’ and ‘Thin Level 2’ - which include English and Maths qualifications - were positive but not so strong – though it should be noted that many of these qualifications are of a very short duration. This report presents the findings from a project that investigates labour market returns to these English and Maths qualifications, in two different situations: • Complementary Learning i.e. when combined with higher level qualifications • Highest Learning Aim - when they are studied as a person’s highest FE qualification (i.e. not taken with a higher qualification

Development of new therapeutic strategies in the control of asthma

Asthma is a chronic inflammatory disease of the airways which affects more than 300 million people worldwide. Asthma treatment aims to improve patients' quality of life reducing airway inflammation and restoring respiratory function. Most patients can achieve good asthma control, but some patients do not. It seems increasingly evident that asthma is not a single and local disease but has different phenotypes and develops as a systemic disease, that could explain the non-constant therapeutic response. In light of this, the aim of this thesis project was to clarify on the one hand the involvement of sphingolipids such as sphingosine-1-phosphate (S1P) in the pathogenesis of asthma and on the other hand to clarify the contribution of sex hormones and vascular function to symptoms and exacerbations development. The results obtained demonstrate: • a key role SPK/S1P pathway in the development of bronchial hyperactivity as well as airway remodeling associated with exposure to cigarette smoke; • that sex hormones cause a sex dimorphism in bronchial hyperreactivity following allergen sensitization in favor of females. This sex dimorphism well correlate with leukotrienes upregulation in the lung; • that there is a strong and specific link between bronchial and vascular function and involvement of the pulmonary artery in determining the systemic impact of the disease. In conclusion, the data obtained confirm the complexity of asthmatic pathology and its relationship with other pulmonary and systemic inflammatory pathologies

Nichilismo e critica delle illusioni in Giacomo Leopardi.

Nella seguente tesi viene analizzato il concetto del nulla in Giacomo Leopardi con particolare riferimento allo Zibaldone. E partendo dal nulla si arriva alla teoria del piacere e delle illusioni che sono sempre rapportate al confronto con la natura e con la ragione. Per quanto riguarda invece la poesia viene preso in esame, sempre in rapporto alla natura, ciò che essa è stata nella produzione leopardiana e cosa ha significato relativamente al nulla e al nichilismo, lasciando parlare alcuni tra i più grandi critici del Leopardi: De Sanctis, Croce, Binni, Luporini, Timpanaro e Prete. Particolare attenzione è dedicata al confronto Severino-Givone che espongono i loro particolari e interessanti punti di vista sul nichilismo leopardiano. L'ultima sezione è invece incentrata sul rapporto, sempre in termini di nichilismo, tra Leopardi e Nietzsche

Quantitative Evaluation Techniques for Regional Policies

In recent years, the vision of what the essential factors for growth are and therefore the role of local policies has drastically changed. The importance of aspects such as human capital, innovation, agglomeration and institutions coupled with the diversified impacts of globalization, have drawn attention to the often-neglected role of space for growth and growth policies (Barca et al. 2012). Moreover, the presence of a wide and persistent inequality in income and joblessness among local areas, regions and countries, exacerbated by the Great Recession, has suggested a more important role for spatially targeted policies. Austin et al. (2018) indicate that place-based policies should be considered in this framework, because “social problems are increasingly linked to a lack of jobs rather than a lack of income” and “subsidizing job creation may be easier at the place level than at the person level”. Barca et al. (2012) argue that “space matters and shapes the potential for development not only of territories, but, through externalities, of the individuals who live in them.” Therefore, the place-based approach is more appropriate than a space-neutral sectoral approach if the geographical context matters, in terms of social, cultural, and institutional characteristics. These considerations have led to a new spread of place-based policies, often accompanied by skepticism with respect to their results from a significant group of economists and politicians (see, for instance, Glaeser and Gottlieb 2008). Indeed, “a fundamental concern is that spatially targeted policies may simply shift economic activity from one locality to another, with little impact on the aggregate level of output” (Kline and Moretti 2014). It is therefore not surprising that in recent years there has been a particular effort in the development of techniques capable of evaluating the effectiveness of territorial policies. In this survey of place-based policy evaluation techniques, we have chosen to consider only methodologies and studies based on the counterfactual approach. The reason is that we are convinced that to identify the effects of a policy we need a causal model, and the counterfactual approach is the most widely used and convincing approach in this field. The counterfactual approach, typical of program evaluation literature, attempts to compare what actually happened with what would have happened in the absence of the treatment. As each unit can be exposed or not exposed to the treatment (see Holland 1986), the researcher is bound to compare treated units with distinct untreated units. This approach derives from the potential outcomes framework (see Rubin 1974) where pairs of outcomes are defined for the same unit given different levels of exposure to the treatment, with the researcher only observing the potential outcome corresponding to the level of treatment received. Models are developed for the pair of potential outcomes rather than solely for the observed outcome. The potential outcomes framework has a number of advantages over a framework based directly on realized outcomes: i) it allows one to define causal effects before specifying the assignment mechanism, and without making functional form or distributional assumptions; ii) it forces the researcher to think about scenarios under which each outcome could be observed, that is, to consider the kinds of experiments that could reveal the causal effects; iii) it allows formulation of probabilistic assumptions in terms of potentially observable variables, rather than in terms of unobserved components; iv) it separates the modeling of the potential outcomes from that of the assignment mechanism. Of particular importance in Rubin’s approach is the relationship between treatment assignment and the potential outcomes (Imbens and Wooldridge 2009). The simplest case for analysis is random assignment of the treatment, which ensures that there are no systematic differences between the treatment and control groups before treatment assignment. This implies that any observed differences in outcomes following the treatment can then be attributed to the treatment itself, rather than to selection bias. Therefore, it is straightforward to obtain estimators for the average effect of the treatment. Randomized experiments have been used in some areas in economics but hardly ever in regional economics. This is why in this survey we will focus on observational studies

Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Firm Subsidies in Lagging-Behind Areas: The Italian Job

Since the late 1990s, Italian scholars have produced numerous studies in the field of regional policy evaluation, especially ones that have investigated the impact of financial incentives aimed at supporting the accumulation of private capital in underdeveloped areas. The number and innovativeness of these studies make it possible to define the presence of an Italian school for evaluating regional policies. This paper testifies to the importance and methodological advances of this school, putting it at the frontier of policy evaluation analyses. The presentation of the studies moves in two directions, historical and methodological, identifying the main themes and techniques addressed in recent years: the evaluation of Law 488 and negotiated programming policies, on the one hand, the advance in policy evaluation techniques in the presence of interactions and continuous treatment, on the other. The paper does not claim to be an exhaustive review; rather, it should be considered an overview of the historical path and the future prospects of what we call «the Italian school of regional policy evaluation»