Claudia Vittori

Moving towards estimating sons' lifetime intergenerational economic mobility in the UK

Estimates of intergenerational economic mobility that use point in time measures of income and earnings suffer from lifecycle and attenuation bias. They also suffer from sample selection issues and further bias driven by spells out of work. We consider these issues together for UK data, the National Child Development Study and British Cohort Study, for the first time. When all three biases are considered, our best estimate of lifetime intergenerational economic persistence in the UK is 0.43 for children born in 1970. Whilst we argue that this is the best available estimate to date, we discuss why there is good reason to believe that this is still a lower bound, owing to residual attenuation bias.

Prognostic impact of late gadolinium enhancement in the risk stratification of heart transplant patients

Aims The aim of the present study was to assess the association of the presence and amount of late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) at cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) with cardiovascular adverse events in patients with orthotopic heart transplantation (HTx). Methods and results We enrolled 48 patients (mean age, 54.7 ± 14.6 years; 37 men) at various stages after HTx. All patients underwent standard CMR at 1.5 T, to characterize both cardiac anatomy and LGE. Late gadolinium enhancement was detected in 26 patients (54%). All-cause and cardiovascular mortalities, and a composite of major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE) recurrence were evaluated during the follow-up period for a median of 5.16 years. Ten patients (21%) died and 26 (54%) were readmitted because of MACE. Multivariate Cox analysis identified as independent predictors of MACE a diagnosis of cardiac allograft vasculopathy (CAV) (HR 3.63; 1.5–8.7 95% CI; P = 0.0039), left ventricular end systolic volume index (HR 1.04; 95% CI 1.01–1.079; P = 0.008), LGE mass (HR 1.04; 1.01–1.06 95% CI; P = 0.0007), LGE % of left ventricular mass (HR 1.083; 1.03–1.13 95% CI; P = 0.0002). Independent predictors of all-cause death were CAV (HR 6.33; 95% CI 1.33–30.03; P = 0.0201), LGE mass (HR 1.04; 1.01–1.07 95% CI; P = 0.005), LGE % of left ventricular mass (HR 1.075; 1.02–1.13 95% CI; P = 0.007). Patients with CAV had a risk of MACE by 5 years of 67% (95% CI 0.309–0.851%); the addition of 7.9 LGE % to the risk model increased the predicted risk to 88% (95% CI 0.572–0.967%). Conclusions The current study demonstrated that the presence of CAV and the total amount of LGE have a significant independent association with MACE and mortality in HTx patients.

The role of intraoperative transoesophageal echocardiography in the diagnosis and management of a rare multiple fibroelastoma of aortic valve: a case report and review of literature

Papillary fibroelastoma is the third most common primary tumour of the heart that usually involves the cardiac valves. Multiple papillary fibroelastomas are extremely rare. We report a case with multiple valve papillary fibroelastoma which was identified only by intraoperative transoesophageal echocardiography. The patient complained of atypical chest pains. She was affected by coronary artery disease and had previously had a myocardial infarct. This finding dictated a change in the operative approach. The aortic valve resection was performed in addition to coronary revascularization. If the intraoperative transoesophageal echocardiography was not performed, our patient would have had just coronary artery bypass graft surgery, probably without solving the symptoms. Furthermore, in future she would have undergone another cardiac operation for resection of aortic masses and valve replacement. The intraoperative use of Transoesophageal Echocardiography improves the diagnosis and the management of all cardiac surgical patients.

Earnings Mobility and Inequality: An Integrated Framework

In this paper we propose an integrated framework for the analysis of earnings inequality and mobility, which enables the analysis of the distributional dimension of inequality reduction from mobility, an assessment of the economic drivers of mobility and a sense of which drivers are equalising and dis-equalising. In particular we are able to capture the extent to which life-cycle characteristics, key life events, job related characteristics, and changes in working time affect overall mobility and inequality. The framework also offers a bounded approach to isolating the underlying inequality reduction resulting from mobility from measurement error which can otherwise lead to a substantial upward bias. Using data from the Australian HILDA survey we find evidence of a sizable degree of earnings mobility in Australia over the years 2001/2 to 2008/9. The raw inequality reduction resulting from economic mobility was 0.148 Gini points from an initial estimate of 0.368, however, the bounded range based on two alternative versions of two stage estimation lies between 0.072 and 0.102 or between 1/4 and 1/3 of original inequality. We show how the inequality reduction from mobility is primarily driven in the bottom part of the initial distribution, with the upper tail being particularly prone to measurement issues. A sizeable part of the identified mobility is simply driven by age-earnings growth that sees more rapid wage increases for younger workers and wage progression among women in notably stronger in reducing inequality because they start lower in distribution. Yet this rather smooth picture of earnings rising with age is shown to be substantially driven by a series of less frequent step changes associated with job-to-job moves, promotions and taking on more responsibility. There are also shocks which run against this equalising process, most notably job loss, which has substantial negative effects on earnings and disproportionately falls on lower waged workers.

Routinization and the Labour Market: Evidence from European Countries

In this chapter, we analyse the routinization process in European countries, using the longitudinal component of the EU Survey on Income and Living Conditions (SILC). Our findings confirm that routine jobs and the routine intensity of jobs are decreasing in time. Further, we study the determinants of routinization, using the EU-SILC data, and find that young individuals are more likely to hold routine jobs, as are workers with lower education or those employed in temporary jobs. This evidence applies for overall Europe as well as for different groups of countries. Finally, routinization represents a driver of unemployment inflows: individuals in routine jobs display, ceteris paribus, a higher probability to become unemployed: a one standard deviation increase in the RTI index entails a 10% increase of getting into unemployment.

Global and disaggregated measures of earnings mobility: evidence from five european countries

This paper offers the first application of the local approximation method pioneered by Schluter and Trede (2003) for the Shorrocks mobility indices across the earnings distribution for a range of European Countries covering the main European social models: Denmark, Germany, Spain, the UK and Italy in the pre-accession EU (1994-2001). This insightful approach allows us to offer a global and disaggregate analysis of mobility as proportionate change in inequality and hence provide the reader with a full set of information to make his/her own judgment about the extent of mobility and country ranking. Specifically, we investigate the degree to which mobility is driven by low or high earners and how this picture changes across three different earnings measures: full-time full-year working, adding part-time working and then part-year working. Our results draw out some general key facts. First of all the vast bulk of the measured mobility occurs in the tails especially the lower tail with at least half of the index driven by mobility in the bottom earning quintile. Second, in the top 20 percent of the distribution there are few movements of earnings that effect the level of permanent inequality except in Denmark. Third, no country has a clear dominance for mobility across the full earnings distribution but Denmark differs from the other countries with clearly greater mobility in the middle and at the top. Finally, we find that with the exception of Denmark and Italy, mobility does not lead to clear convergence to the mean but rather to points around 0.7-0.8 and 1.5 to 2 times the mean.