Anna Soci

Does Inequality Harm Democracy? An Empirical Investigation on the UK

This paper presents an empirical investigation about the effect of an increase in economic inequality on some aspects of the quality of a democracy. The main novelty of the paper lies in its methodology: it applies to a single country (instead of a pool of countries) - the UK - in a long run perspective. Using survey data, we select three questions and check whether an increase in inequality alters the answers to these questions, subject to other control variables. Another novelty is the use of several measures of inequality (rather than the usual GINI only) both for disentangling what happens in the different parts of the income distribution and for avoiding the dependence of the results on the choice of the indicator. The main finding is that a higher level of income inequality impacts negatively on citizens’ satisfaction with democracy and positively on their political participation.

Teaching, Visibility and Scholarly Production: A gender-based inquiry into a case of professorship competition in Italy

A. Soci Department of Economics, University of Bologna, Italy INTRODUCTION Anglo-Saxon, and especially American, literature has been delving into the relationship between women and the labor market for more than thirty years. Some attention has also been given to the relative position of women in the academic hierarchy. Italy and – with some exceptions – the rest of Europe seem to be completely absent from the latter debate. Thus, results of the American institutional context have been extensively generalized. The aim of this paper is to offer a different scenario for the field of Economics in Italy.

Institutional change and FDI in three selected CEECs: The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland

The European enlargement provides new space for re-organizing the production and re-locating the plants. Few studies approach the complex theme of industrial location in the EU new-comers: statistics are still scarce, language constitutes a barrier for assuming reliable information, and the differences in the economic and institutional structure bring further difficulties. This paper aims at investigating the relation between institutional change in this area and FDI. In particular, the focus will be on the privatisation process, which has played a major role in determining the behaviour of the firms and thus the direction of the FDI.