Decio Coviello

Financial Education and Investment Attitudes in High Schools: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment

We experimentally study the effect of financial education on investment attitudes in a large sample of high school students in Italy. Students in the treated classes were taught a course in finance and interviewed before and after the study, while controls were only interviewed. Our principal result is that the difference-in-difference estimates of the effect of the course are not statistically significant. However, the course in finance reduced the virtual demand for cash, and increased the level of financial literacy and the propensity to read (and the capacity to understand) economic articles in both treated and control classes compared with pre-treatment baseline levels. A breakdown of the cognitive process, which is statistically significant for the classes treated, suggests that error and ignorance reduction was sizable, and that the progress in financial literacy was stronger in subgroups which exhibited lower ex-ante knowledge levels.

Does Aid Help Improve Economic Institutions

Aid is expected to promote better living standards by raising investment and growth. But aid may also affect institutions directly. In theory, these effects may or may not work in the same direction as those on investment. The authors examine the effect of aid on economic institutions and find that aid has neither a positive nor a negative impact on existing measures of economic institutions. They find the results using pooled data for non-overlapping five-year periods, confirmed by pooled annual regressions for a large panel of countries and by pure cross-section regressions. The authors explicitly allow for time invariant effects that are country specific and find the results to be robust to model specifications, estimation methods, and different data sets.

Tenure in Office and Public Procurement

We investigate how the functioning of public procurement is affected by the time politicians have stayed in office. We match a data set on public procurement auctions by Italian municipalities to a data set on the politics of municipal governments. For each municipality, we relate the mayor’s tenure in office to several outcomes of the procurement process. The main result is that an increase in a mayor’s tenure (the number of terms in office) is associated with “worse” outcomes: fewer bidders per auction, a higher cost of procurement, and a higher probability that the winner is local and that the same firm is awarded repeated auctions. We make use of a quasi-experimental change in the electoral law (the introduction of a two-term limit) to argue that the correlation is in fact causal. Finally, we provide a simple theoretical model of repeated auctions in which these findings are consistent with time in office progressively leading to collusion between government officials and a few favored bidders.

Court Efficiency and Procurement Performance

Disputes over penalties for breaching a contract are often resolved in court. A simple model illustrates how inefficient courts can sway public buyers from enforcing a penalty for late delivery in order to avoid litigation, therefore inducing sellers to delay contract delivery. By using a large dataset on Italian public procurement, we empirically study the effects of court inefficiency on public work performance. We find that where courts are inefficient: i) public works are delivered with longer delays; ii) delays increase for more valuable contracts; iii) contracts are more often awarded to larger suppliers; and iv) a higher share of the payment is postponed after delivery. Other interpretations receive less support from the data.

The Role of Publicity Requirements on Entry and Auctions Outcomes

Using a regression discontinuity design, we document the effect of publicizing a procurement auction on entry and outcomes. We collect a large sample of procurement auctions, which by Italian law are assigned different publicity levels on the basis of their reserve price. We find that auctions publicized at the regional level have more bidders and higher winning rebates compared to auctions that are publicized on the notice board of the public administration managing the auction. Regionally-publicized auctions are also more likely to be won by bidders from outside the region, less likely to be won by small companies, and the same firm is more likely to win repeated auctions. Taken together, our results suggest that publicity informs more bidders and reduces search and preparation costs, which encourages entry and “improves” procurement.

An Economic Analysis of Black-White Disparities in the New York Police Department’s Stop-and-Frisk Program

We introduce a model to explore the identification of two distinct sources of bias in the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk program: the police officer making the stop decisions and the police chief allocating personnel across precincts. We analyze 10 years of data from the stop-and-frisk program in light of this theoretical framework. We find that white pedestrians are slightly less likely than African American pedestrians to be arrested conditional on being stopped. We interpret this finding as evidence that the officers making the stops are on average not biased against African Americans relative to whites, because the latter are stopped despite being a less productive stop for a police officer. We find suggestive evidence of police bias in the decision to frisk. Further research is needed.

Multitasking, Multiarmed Bandits, and the Italian Judiciary

We model how a judge schedules cases as a multiarmed bandit problem. The model indicates that a first-in-first-out (FIFO) scheduling policy is optimal when the case completion hazard rate function is monotonic. But there are two ways to implement FIFO in this context: at the hearing level or at the case level. Our model indicates that the former policy, prioritizing the oldest hearing, is optimal when the case completion hazard rate function decreases, and the latter policy, prioritizing the oldest case, is optimal when the case completion hazard rate function increases. This result convinced six judges of the Roman Labor Court of Appeals—a court that exhibits increasing hazard rates—to switch from hearing-level FIFO to case-level FIFO. Tracking these judges for eight years, we estimate that our intervention decreased the average case duration by 12% and the probability of a decision being appealed to the Italian supreme court by 3.8%, relative to a 44-judge control sample.