La Dolce Vita: Hedonic Estimates of Quality of Life in Italian Cities

This paper provides an assessment of quality of life in Italian cities using the hedonic approach. We analyze micro-level data for housing and labor markets to estimate compensating differentials for local amenities within five domains: climate, environment, services, society and economy. The estimated implicit prices are used to construct overall and domain-specific quality of life indices. We find that differences in amenities are reflected in substantial compensating differentials in housing prices, whereas the effects on wages are relatively small. Quality of life varies substantially across space and is strongly related to differences in public services and economic conditions. Overall, quality of life is highest in medium-sized cities of the Center-North, displaying relatively high scores in all the domains considered. Northern cities fare better with respect to services, social and economic conditions, while relatively worse for climate and environmental conditions.quality of life, hedonic prices, housing markets

American baby-losers? Robust indirect comparison of affluence across generations

We propose an indirect and robust method to detect a change in the concentration of economic affluence defined as an aggregate measure of the command over lifetime resources when the full stream of income receipts along the life cycle is unknown and only consumption surveys are available. The method relies on a new stochastic ordering, the “Generalized Top Lorenz” and the key-property of concavity of consumption with respect to wealth. Our application on US data for the period 1980-2002 shows a moderate increase in economic affluence and points out the di¢ cult start in life of people belonging to the "Baby loser generation" (people born in the sixties).concavity, wealth, dominance orderings, consumption.

Equity in the City: On Measuring Urban (Ine)Quality of Life

We merge contributions from the New Urban Economics and inequality measurement to assess quality of life (QOL) in a given city. We take the point of view of a city planner in favor of an even accessibility to amenities within the city. Instead of the average value of amenities computed in the Roback (1982) QOL index, our index captures the value of its multidimensional "certainty equivalent". We apply this methodology to derive a QOL index for the city of Milan.Urban quality of life, amenities, hedonic prices, inequality index, just city.

Measuring Tolerant Behavior

Abstract This paper addresses the issue of measuring tolerance, viewed as a multifaceted phenomenon involving several different social domains. We develop a multidimensional index for Likert-scale data, characterized by the following features: (i) it reflects the individual's intensity of tolerant attitudes towards each social domain; (ii) the index can be broken down by dimension in order to determine the contribution of each dimension to overall tolerance; (iii) the index combines the different dimensions of tolerance using a weighted scheme that reflects the importance of each dimension in determining the overall level of tolerance. To show how this new measure of tolerance works in practice, we carry out a case study using an Italian recent survey asking the opinion of university students about different subjects, such as interreligious dialog, women/religion relationship, religion/death relationship, homosexuality, and multicultural society

Cities and Inequality

Abstract. We propose an innovative methodology to measure inequality between cities. If an even distribution of amenities across cities is assumed to increase the average well-being in a given country, inequality between cities can be evaluated through a multidimensional index of the Atkinson (1970) type. This index is shown to be decomposable into the sum of inequality indices computed on the marginal distributions of the amenities across cities, plus a residual term accounting for their correlation. We apply this methodology to assess inequality between Italian cities in terms of the distribution of public infrastructures, local services, economic and environmental conditions

Measuring Economic Well-Being in a Multidimensional Perspective

The paper aims to identify structural differences among European countries concerning inequality of living conditions and opportunities, and quantified by well-being indicators, so to: 1) compare living standards across countries and 2) find out whether a trend may be singled out

Hedonic Price Indexes for the Housing Market in Italian Cities Hedonic Price Indexes for the Housing Market in Italian Cities *

Abstract To develop a price index for the housing market in Italy, we adopt the hedonic approach which enables us to separate the price variations due to qualitative changes in housing attributes from pure price changes, i.e.intrinsic real estate price variations. The resulting index is much more robust and accurate than the mean price indexes commonly used by real estate professionals in Italy. Using data from Italy's "Real Estate Observatory" we develo

La disuguaglianza delle citta' in Italia: Un approccio multidimensionale

In questo capitolo si presenta una nuova metodologia per confrontare i livelli di qualita' della vita e di benessere tra le citta' italiane tenendo in considerazione piu' dimensioni e le preferenze degli individui sull'importanza delle diverse dimensioni considerate