Has Covid vaccination success increased the marginal willingness to pay taxes?

The Covid-19 vaccination campaign can be regarded as a public-sector success story. Given the shock caused by the pandemic, the visible and successful response of the public authorities regarding vaccination might have elicited an increase in the public’s trust. We test whether the vaccination process has increased the marginal willingness to pay taxes (MWTP). Taking advantage of the different paths of vaccination in Spain, we pursue a difference-in-difference empirical strategy, complemented by an event study, to infer causality running from vaccination to MWTP. We find an increase in MWTP caused by the good governance related to vaccination

Political cicles and Yardstick competition in the recycling of waste, evidence from Italian provinces

Recycling and the recovery of waste are crucial waste management strategies. In light of the new EU circular economy approach, these strategies remain core pillars of a competitive and sustainable waste value chain. Local governments have an important role in controlling and checking the implementation of waste management policies. We study the spatial determinants of waste recovery by using a dataset of 102 Italian provinces from the years 2001-2014. We exploit the political cycle of the provinces to isolate the effects of waste recovery in one province on neighboring provinces. We find that provinces mimic their own neighbors’ in the separate collection of waste aimed at recycling and recovery, with this effect being fully guided by provinces where the president can run for re-election (consistent with the yardstick competition hypothesis) but only when waste management policies become politically salient, that is, after the transposition of the 2008 EU Waste Framework Directive

Fiscal knowledge and its impact on revealed MWTP in Covid times: Evidence from survey data

Individual preferences over public policies should ideally be based on the possession of correct information about their reality. To test whether this holds, we conducted four waves of a survey, every six months since May 2020 (still under the COVID-19- lockdown), asking basic macro questions regarding the level of tax burden, of public debt, and of the underground economy in Spain. The percentage of correct responses (defined within broad ranges) never reaches 35%, and it is by far lowest for public debt. For the tax burden, leftwing individuals (with respect to right-wing) make more errors, and highly educated people (with respect to the rest of society) make fewer. No clear deterministic patterns arise for públic debt and for the underground economy.I Independently of the percentage of errors, we infer the existence of relative biases across different social characteristics: highly educated people tend to undervalue the level of the tax burden and of the underground economy and overvalue the level of public debt; leftist individuals undervalue the level of the tax burden and of the public debt but overvalue the level of the underground economy. There are also significant gender biases: with respect to men, women overvalue the tax burden and the importance of the underground economy, and undervalue the level of public debt. This misinformation and biases correlate with the marginal willingness to pay taxes (MWTP). MWTP is 10% higher under the presence of misinformation. This is particularly so for those individuals who undervalue the real level of the tax burden. Although COVID-19 generates greater interest to collect information, including about fiscal issues, there is a decrease in knowledge. The pandemic seems to have produced an excess of information up to causing misinformation. We also observe a general tendency to undervalue the level of public debt provoked by the exposure to COVID-19, which might be caused by the lax fiscal policy carried out during the pandemic

Interazione spaziale nella spesa dei comuni Italiani:Un’analisi empirica

This paper uses a dynamic spatial autoregressive model on a sample of 5564 Italian municipalities over the period 2001-2011. By exploiting the spatial contiguity of municipalities, the analysis points to the existence of a positive and significant effects in neighboring spending decisions on its own municipal expenditure (total, current and investment expenditure). Further analysis indicate that such an effect is not consistent with the yardstick competition hypothesis, as the spatial dependence is not guided by political factors; rather, we found a negative and significant relationship between spatial interaction and the municipality’s size, thus suggesting that spillover effects drive the strategic interactions among local governments. In fact the higher the size the lower the impact in decreasing costs of public good provision due to the neighboring provision

Three big diseases of Public Administration in the last decade

Nella mia tesi di dottorato ho analizzato a fondo tre malattie della Pubblica Amministrazione, che si sono ampiamente diffuse in tutto il mondo nell'ultimo decennio: i costi dovuti all'elevata complessità dei sistemi fiscali, la corruzione del sistema pubblico e la manipolazione del bilancio durante il ciclo elettorale.In my Phd thesis I analyzed three diseases of the Public Administration,which have been spreading all over the world,in the last decade: complexity tax compliance due to bureaucracy, corruption of the public system and budget manipulation during the electoral cycle

Effetti finanziari delle richieste di autonomia regionale: prime simulazioni

Il 15 febbraio 2019 sono state rese disponibili le bozze di intesa tra il Governo e le Regioni Emilia- Romagna, Veneto e Lombardia, in seguito alla pressante richiesta di maggiore autonomia da parte di queste tre regioni. Basandoci su questi testi e sulla spesa statale regionalizzata, ricostruiamo i flussi di risorse necessari a soddisfare le richieste di decentramento delle funzioni. E’ possibile individuare uno schema di compartecipazioni che finanzino le spese devolute. Nell’ipotesi in cui non siano approvati i fabbisogni standard entro tre anni dall’emanazione dei decreti che avviano le autonomie regionali simuliamo, come previsto nelle intese, l’adozione della spesa media nazionale pro capite per tutte le regioni. Ciò implica un trasferimento di risorse da alcune regioni con spesa pro-capite superiore alla spesa media nazionale ad altre regioni con spesa pro-capite inferiore alla spesa media nazionale. Esaminiamo anche il caso in cui l’istruzione non venga riconosciuta tra le materie devolute. In entrambi i casi le regioni che chiedono autonomia riceverebbero risorse aggiuntive. Nel caso in cui tutte le funzioni di spesa siano considerate ad Emilia Romagna, Veneto Lombardia spetterebbero 2,7 miliardi in più rispetto alla spesa storica, il 17% in più. Nel caso in cui l’istruzione venga esclusa dalla funzioni di spesa devolute vi sarebbe un incremento di risorse di 1,3 miliardi, 21% in più. Infine ipotizzando una crescita dei gettiti asimmetrica tra Nord e Sud Italia, che riprende la previsione di crescita dei consumi per il 2019 di Prometeia, otteniamo un incremento di gettito nelle tre regioni che chiedono l’autonomia pari al 45% dell’incremento di gettito totale

Pandemic knowledge and regulation effectiveness: Evidence from COVID-19

The spread of COVID-19 led countries around the world to adopt lockdown measures of varying stringency, with the purpose of restricting the movement of people. However, the effectiveness of these measures on mobility has been markedly different. Employing a difference-in-differences design, we analyse the effectiveness of movement restrictions across different countries. We disentangle the role of regulation (stringency measures) from the role of people's knowledge about the spread of COVID-19. We proxy COVID-19 knowledge by using Google Trends data on the term “Covid”. We find that lockdown measures have a higher impact on mobility the more people learn about COVID-19. This finding is driven by countries with low levels of trust in institutions and low levels of education

Detrazione unica ed imposta negativa Per riformare l’IRPEF (Unique tax credit and negative income tax to reform the Italian personal income tax

An important issue of the IRPEF (the Italian personal income tax) is the erratic marginal tax rates, that for the middle-class incomes reach 61%. The cause is to be found in the overlapping of different tax credits and the IRPEF bonus which are decreasing with income. We propose to replace the labour income tax credits, that are not available for low-income taxpayers, and the IRPEF bonus with a unique tax credit of 1,840 euro for all tax- payers with an income lower than 55,000 euro together with a negative income tax. Through a micro-simulation, we show that considering revenues recovered from the abolition of different labour income tax credits, the IRPEF bonus and part of the tax-expenditures, the introduction of the unique tax credit would cost about 9 billion euro. This amount would be enough to finance the negative income tax while the disposable income of taxpayers with more than 8,000 euro would remain almost unchanged. Our proposal, without the negative income tax, would come at zero cost and it would correct the erratic marginal tax rates. The reform would stimulate low-income labour supply and file tax returns for undeclared work. The negative income tax, moreover, if well integrated with the Citizens’ Income (the Italian guaranteed minimum income), could solve part of the problem of the poverty trap due to the Citizens’ Income in Ital

Tamponi e big-data, quali effetti sulla diffusione del COVID-19?

Adottando un approccio sperimentale utilizzando i dati giornalieri dei casi positivi COVID-19 forniti dalla Protezione Civile, registrati in due province confinanti (Brescia e Verona) durante il periodo della prima ondata di diffusione del virus in Italia (tra il 24 febbraio 2020 e il 23 giugno 2020). Queste due province sono simili per diverse caratteristiche demografiche, geografiche e socio-economiche, come la quota di anziani sul totale della popolazione residente, il valore aggiunto pro capite, la densità e la popolazione residente; ma con la differenza di appartenere a due regioni diverse. La scelta di confrontare una provincia veneta con una lombarda è stata inoltre guidata dal fatto che livelli di diffusione dei casi positivi sono stati simili nel mese di febbraio 2020 e che in entrambe le regioni, quasi contemporaneamente, si sono sviluppati i primi focolai in Italia: Castiglione d’Adda e Codogno in Lombardia; Vo’ Euganeo in Veneto. Il governatore della Regione Veneto nella giornata del 8 marzo 2020 ha annunciato un piano che prevedeva un utilizzo diffuso dei tamponi per il tracciamento della diffusione del virus insieme all’attivazione di una piattaforma digitale di bio-sorveglianza per poter analizzare in tempo reale la grande mole di informazioni proveniente dai test. Nella vicina regione Lombardia questa politica non è stata adottata. Tra l’8 marzo e il 23 giugno infatti i tamponi ogni mille abitanti effettuati nella regione Veneto sono passati da 3 a 80, mentre nella regione Lombardia, nello stesso arco temporale, sono aumentati solamente da 2 a 58. Abbiamo quindi confrontato la diffusione della pandemia tra le province di Brescia e Verona, prima e dopo l’annuncio di questa politica da parte del governatore del Veneto (8 marzo). In particolare abbiamo implementato un’analisi event study dove la variabile dipendente utilizzata è il numero giornaliero di positivi al COVID-19 per 10.000 abitanti e come variabili indipendenti una dummy per ogni giorno, escludendo quella del giorno prima dell’evento, moltiplicata per una dummy che invece indica la provincia trattata, che è quella veneta. Quanto emerge da questa prima analisi empirica è che la diffusione dei tamponi combinata con un’analisi efficace dei risultati dei test sembra essere stata uno strumento utile che ha contribuito significativamente alla lotta contro la diffusione della pandemia

The heterogenous impact of taxation on FDI: A note on Djankov et al. (2010)

Taxes in the host country matter a lot for FDI inflows, but only for non-OECD countries. Taking advantage of the rich dataset constructed by Djankov et al. (2010), we show, for example, that raising the first-year effective corporate income tax rate by 10 pp reduces FDI inflows by 3.4 to 1.9 pp in non-OECD countries; and the effect is null for OECD countries. Not taking this heterogeneity into account upward (downward) biases the estimated impact of the corporate tax on FDI inflows for OECD (non-OECD) countries